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BOOKS BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



AFRICAN GAME TRAILS. An account of the African 
Wanderings of an American Hunter-Naturalist. 
Illustrated. Large 8vo $-1.00 net 

OUTDOOR PASTIMES OF AN AMERICAN HUNTER. 
New Edition. Illustrated. 8vo . . . $3.00 net 

HISTORY AS LITERATURE and Other Essays. 
12mo $1.50 net 

OLIVER CROMWELL. Illustrated. 8vo . $2.00 net 

THE ROUGH RIDERS. Illustrated. 8vo . $1.50 net 

THE ROOSEVELT BOOK. Selections from the Writ- 
ings of Theodore Roosevelt. l6mo . 50 cents net 



THE ELKHORN EDITION. Complete Works of 
Theodore Roosevelt. 26 volumes. Illustrated. 
8vo. Sold by subscription. 



HISTORY AS LITERATURE 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 



HISTORY AS LITERATURE 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 



BY 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

n 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1913 






Copyright, igi3, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

Published September, 1913 




(e)CI.A354375 



PREFACE 

In this volume I have gathered certain addresses 
I made before the American Historical Associa- 
tion, the University of Oxford, the University of 
Berlin, and the Sorbonne at Paris, together with 
six essays I wrote for The Outlook, and one that 
I wrote for The Century. 

In these addresses and essays I have discussed 
not merely literary but also historical and scien- 
tific subjects, for my thesis is that the domain of 
literature must be ever more widely extended over 
the domains of history and science. There is 
nothing which in this preface I can say to elabo- 
rate or emphasize what I have said on this subject 
in the essays themselves. 

Theodore Roosevelt. 

Sagamore Hill, 
July 4, igij. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



History as Literature i 

Biological Analogies in History ... 37 

The World Movement 95 

Citizenship in a Republic 135 

The Thraldom of Names 175 

Productive Scholarship 195 

Dante and the Bowery 217 

The Foundations of the Nineteenth 

Century 231 

The Search for Truth in a Reverent 

Spirit 245 

The Ancient Irish Sagas 275 

An Art Exhibition 301 

^f% Three chapters, "Biological Analogies in History," "The World 
Movement," and "Citizenship in a Republic," were included in the volume 
entitled "African and European Addresses," 



HISTORY AS LITERATURE 



HISTORY AS LITERATURE^ 

THERE has been much discussion as to 
whether history should not henceforth be 
treated as a branch of science rather than 
of literature. As with most such discussions, 
much of the matter in dispute has referred merely 
to terminology. Moreover, as regards part of the 
discussion, the minds of the contestants have not 
met, the propositions advanced by the two sides 
being neither mutually incompatible nor mutually 
relevant. There is, however, a real basis for con- 
flict in so far as science claims exclusive possession 
of the field. 

There was a time — we see it in the marvellous 
dawn of Hellenic life — when history was distin- 
guished neither from poetry, from mythology, nor 
from the first dim beginnings of science. There 
was a more recent time, at the opening of Rome's 
brief period of literary splendor, when poetry 
was accepted by a great scientific philosopher as 
the appropriate vehicle for teaching the lessons of 
science and philosophy. There was a more recent 

^ Annual address of the president of the American Historical As- 
sociation' delivered at Boston, December 27, 191 2. 

3 



4 HISTORY AS LITERATURE 

time still — the time of Holland's leadership in 
arms and arts — when one of the two or three great- 
est world painters put his genius at the service of 
anatomists. 

In each case the steady growth of specialization 
has rendered such combination now impossible. 
Virgil left history to Livy; and when Tacitus had 
become possible Lucan was a rather absurd anach- 
ronism. The elder Darwin, when he endeavored 
to combine the functions of scientist and poet, 
may have thought of Lucretius as a model; but 
the great Darwin was incapable of such a mistake. 
The surgeons of to-day would prefer the services of 
a good photographer to those of Rembrandt — 
even were those of Rembrandt available. No 
one would now dream of combining the history of 
the Trojan War with a poem on the wrath of 
Achilles. Beowulf's feats against the witch who 
dwelt under the water would not now be men- 
tioned in the same matter-of-fact way that a 
Frisian or Prankish raid is mentioned. We are 
long past the stage when we would accept as parts 
of the same epic Siegfried's triumphs over dwarf 
and dragon, and even a distorted memory of the 
historic Hunnish king in whose feast-hall the Bur- 
gundian heroes held their last revel and made 
their death fight. We read of the loves of the 
Hound of Muirthemne and Emer the Fair with- 
out attributing to the chariot-riding heroes who 



HISTORY AS LITERATURE 5 

** fought over the ears of their horses" and to 
their fierce lady-loves more than a symboHc reality. 
The Roland of the Norman trouveres, the Roland 
who blew the ivory horn at Roncesvalles, is to our 
minds wholly distinct from the actual Warden of 
the Marches who fell in a rear-guard skirmish with 
the Pyrenean Basques. 

As regards philosophy, as distinguished from 
material science and from history, the specializa- 
tion has been incomplete. Poetry is still used as 
a vehicle for the teaching of philosophy. Goethe 
was as profound a thinker as Kant. He has in- 
fluenced the thought of mankind far more deeply 
than Kant because he was also a great poet. 
Robert Browning was a real philosopher, and his 
writings have had a hundredfold the circulation 
and the effect of those of any similar philosopher 
who wrote in prose, just because, and only be- 
cause, what he wrote was not merely philosophy 
but literature. The form in which he wrote chal- 
lenged attention and provoked admiration. That 
part of his work which some of us — which I my- 
self, for instance — most care for is merely poetry. 
But in that part of his work which has exercised 
most attraction and has given him the widest 
reputation, the poetry, the form of expression, 
bears to the thought expressed much the same re- 
lation that the expression of Lucretius bears to 
the thought of Lucretius. As regards this, the 



6 HISTORY AS LITERATURE 

great mass of his product, he is primarily a phi- 
losopher, whose writings surpass in value those of 
other similar philosophers precisely because they 
are not only philosophy but literature. In other 
words. Browning the philosopher is read by coimt- 
less thousands to whom otherwise philosophy 
would be a sealed book, for exactly the same rea- 
son that Macaulay the historian is read by count- 
less thousands to whom otherwise history would 
be a sealed book; because both Browning's works 
and Macaulay 's works are material additions to 
the great sum of English literature. Philosophy 
is a science just as history is a science. There is 
need in one case as in the other for vivid and power- 
ful presentation of scientific matter in literary 
form. 

This does not mean that there is the like need 
in the two cases. History can never be truthfully 
presented if the presentation is purely emotional. 
It can never be truthfully or usefully presented 
unless profound research, patient, laborious, pains- 
taking, has preceded the presentation. No 
amount of self-communion and of pondering on 
the sotd of mankind, no gorgeousness of literary 
imagery, can take the place of cool, serious, widely 
extended study. The vision of the great historian 
must be both wide and lofty. But it must be 
sane, clear, and based on full knowledge of the 
facts and of their interrelations. Otherwise we 



HISTORY AS LITERATURE 7 

get merely a splendid bit of serious romance-wri- 
ting, like Carlyle's ''French Revolution." Many 
hard-working students, alive to the deficiencies 
of this kind of romance-writing, have grown to 
distrust not only all historical writing that is 
romantic, but all historical writing that is vivid. 
They feel that complete truthfulness must never 
be sacrificed to color. In this they are right. 
They also feel that complete truthfulness is in- 
compatible with color. In this they are wrong. 
The immense importance of full knowledge of 
a mass of dry facts and gray details has so im- 
pressed them as to make them feel that the dry- 
ness and the grayness are in themselves merito- 
rious. 

These students have rendered invaluable serv- 
ice to history. They are right in many of their 
contentions. They see how literature and science 
have specialized. They realize that scientific 
methods are as necessary to the proper study of 
history as to the proper study of astronomy or 
zoology. They know that in many, perhaps in 
most, of its forms, literary ability is divorced from 
the restrained devotion to the actual fact which 
is as essential to the historian as to the scientist. 
They know that nowadays science ostentatiously 
disclaims any connection with literature. They 
feel that if this is essential for science, it is no less 
essential for history. 



8 HISTORY AS LITERATURE 

There is much truth in all these contentions. 
Nevertheless, taking them all together, they do 
not indicate what these hard-working students 
believed that they indicate. Because history, 
science, and literature have all become special- 
ized, the theory now is that science is definitely 
severed from literature and that history must fol- 
low suit. Not only do I refuse to accept this as 
true for history, but I do not even accept it as 
true for science. 

Literature may be defined as that which has 
permanent interest because both of its substance 
and its form, aside from the mere technical value 
that inheres in a special treatise for specialists. 
For a great work of literature there is the same 
demand now that there always has been; and in 
any great work of literature the first element is 
great imaginative power. The imaginative power 
demanded for a great historian is different from 
that demanded for a great poet; but it is no less 
marked. Such imaginative power is in no sense 
incompatible with minute accuracy. On the con- 
trary, very accurate, very real and vivid, presen- 
tation of the past can come only from one in 
whom the imaginative gift is strong. The in- 
dustrious collector of dead facts bears to such a 
man precisely the relation that a photographer 
bears to Rembrandt. There are innumerable 
books, that is, innumerable volumes of printed 



HISTORY AS LITERATURE 9 

matter between covers, which are excellent for 
their own purposes, but in which imagination 
would be as wholly out of place as in the blue 
prints of a sewer system or in the photographs 
taken to illustrate a work on comparative oste- 
ology. But the vitally necessary sewer system 
does not take the place of the cathedral of Rheims 
or of the Parthenon; no quantity of photographs 
will ever be equivalent to one Rembrandt; and 
the greatest mass of data, although indispensable 
to the work of a great historian, is in no shape or 
way a substitute for that work. 

History, taught for a directly and immediately 
useful purpose to pupils and the teachers of pupils, 
is one of the necessary features of a sound educa- 
tion in democratic citizenship. A book contain- 
ing such sound teaching, even if without any 
literary quality, may be as useful to the student 
and as creditable to the writer as a similar book 
on medicine. I am not slighting such a book 
when I say that, once it has achieved its worthy 
purpose, it can be permitted to lapse from human 
memory as a good book on medicine, which has 
outHved its usefulness, lapses from memory. But 
the historical work which does possess literary 
quality may be a permanent contribution to the 
sum of man's wisdom, enjoyment, and inspira- 
tion. The writer of such a book must add wis- 
dom to knowledge, and the gift of expression to the 
gift of imagination. 



lo HISTORY AS LITERATURE 



It is a shallow criticism to assert that imagina- 
tion tends to inaccuracy. Only a distorted imag- 
ination tends to inaccuracy. Vast and fundamental 
truths can be discerned and interpreted only by 
one whose imagination is as lofty as the soul of a 
Hebrew prophet. When we say that the great 
historian must be a man of imagination, we use 
the word as we use it when we say that the great 
statesman must be a man of imagination. More- 
over, together with imagination must go the power 
of expression. The great speeches of statesmen 
and the great writings of historians can Hve only 
if they possess the deathless quality that inheres 
in all great literature. The greatest literary his- 
torian must of necessity be a master of the science 
of history, a man who has at his finger-tips all the 
accumulated facts from the treasure-houses of the 
dead past. But he must also possess the power to 
marshal what is dead so that before our eyes it 
lives again. 

Many learned people seem to feel that the qual- 
ity of readableness in a book is one which war- 
rants suspicion. Indeed, not a few learned peo- 
ple seem to feel that the fact that a book is 
interesting is proof that it is shallow. This is 
particularly apt to be the attitude of scientific 
men. Very few great scientists have written in- 
terestingly, and these few have usually felt 
apologetic about it. Yet sooner or later the time 
will come when the mighty sweep of modem 



HISTORY AS LITERATURE n 

scientific discovery will be placed, by scientific 
men with the gift of expression, at the service of 
intelligent and cultivated laymen. Such service 
will be inestimable. Another writer of ''Canter- 
bury Tales," another singer of "Paradise Lost," 
could not add more to the sum of literary achieve- 
ment than the man who may picture to us the 
phases of the age-long history of life on this 
globe, or make vivid before our eyes the tremen- 
dous march of the worlds through space. 

Indeed, I believe that already science has owed 
more than it suspects to the imconscious literary 
power of some of its representatives. Scientific 
writers of note had grasped the fact of evolution 
long before Darwin and Huxley; and the theories 
advanced by these men to explain evolution were 
not much more imsatisfactory, as full explanations, 
than the theory of natural selection itself. Yet, 
where their predecessors had created hardly a 
ripple, Darwin and Huxley succeeded in effecting 
a complete revolution in the thought of the age, 
a revolution as great as that caused by the dis- 
covery of the truth about the solar system. I 
believe that the chief explanation of the difference 
was the very simple one that what Darwin and 
Huxley wrote was interesting to read. Every cul- 
tivated man soon had their volumes in his library, 
and they still keep their places on our book- 
shelves. But Lamarck and Cope are only to be 



12 HISTORY AS LITERATURE 

found in the libraries of a few special students. 
If they had possessed a gift of expression akin to 
Darwin's, the doctrine of evolution would not in 
the popular mind have been confounded with the 
doctrine of natural selection and a juster esti- 
mate than at present would obtain as to the rela- 
tive merits of the explanations of evolution cham- 
pioned by the different scientific schools. 

Do not misunderstand me. In the field of his- 
torical research an immense amoimt can be done 
by men who have no Hterary power whatever. 
Moreover, the most painstaking and laborious re- 
search, covering long periods of years, is necessary 
in order to accumulate the material for any his- 
tory worth writing at all. There are important 
by-paths of history, moreover, which hardly ad- 
mit of treatment that would make them of in- 
terest to any but specialists. All this I fully 
admit. In particular I pay high honor to the 
patient and truthful investigator. He does an 
indispensable work. My claim is merely that 
such work should not exclude the work of the 
great master who can use the materials gathered, 
who has the gift of vision, the quality of the seer, 
the power himself to see what has happened and 
to make what he has seen clear to the vision of 
others. My only protest is against those who be- 
lieve that the extension of the activities of the 
most competent mason and most energetic con- 



HISTORY AS LITERATURE 13 

tractor will supply the lack of great architects. 
If, as in the Middle Ages, the journeymen builders 
are themselves artists, why this is the best pos- 
sible solution of the problem. But if they are not 
artists, then their work, however much it repre- 
sents of praiseworthy industry, and of positive 
usefulness, does not take the place of the work of a 
great artist. 

Take a concrete example. It is only of recent 
years that the importance of inscriptions has been 
realized. To the present-day scholar they are in- 
valuable. Even to the layman, some of them 
turn the past into the present with startling clear- 
ness. The least imaginative is moved by the sim- 
ple inscription on the Etruscan sarcophagus: "I, 
the great lady"; a lady so haughty that no other 
human being was allowed to rest near her; and 
yet now nothing remains but this proof of the 
pride of the nameless one. Or the inscription in 
which Queen Hatshepsu recounts her feats and 
her magnificence, and ends by adjuring the on- 
looker, when overcome by the recital, not to say 
"how wonderful" but "how like her!" — could any 
picture of a living queen be more intimately 
vivid ? With such inscriptions before us the wonder 
is that it took us so long to realize their worth. 
Not unnaturally this realization, when it did come, 
was followed by the belief that inscriptions would 
enable us to dispense with the great historians of 



14 HISTORY AS LITERATURE 

antiquity. This error is worse than the former. 
Where the inscriptions give us Hght on what 
would otherwise be darkness, we must be pro- 
foundly grateful; but we must not confound the 
lesser light with the greater. We could better 
afford to lose every Greek inscription that has 
ever been found than the chapter in which Thucyd- 
ides tells of the Athenian failure before Syracuse. 
Indeed, few inscriptions teach us as much his- 
tory as certain forms of Hterature that do not 
consciously aim at teaching history at all. The 
inscriptions of Hellenistic Greece in the third 
century before our era do not, all told, give us 
so lifelike a view of the ordinary life of the ordi- 
nary men and women who dwelt in the great Hel- 
lenistic cities of the time, as does the fifteenth idyl 
of Theocritus. 

This does not mean that good history can be 
unscientific. So far from ignoring science, the 
great historian of the future can do nothing un- 
less he is steeped in science. He can never equal 
what has been done by the great historians of the 
past tinless he writes not merely with full knowl- 
edge, but with an intensely vivid consciousness, 
of all that of which they were necessarily ignorant. 
He must accept what we now know to be man's 
place in nature. He must realize that man has 
been on this earth for a period of such incalculable 
length that, from the standpoint of the student 



HISTORY AS LITERATURE 15 

of his development through time, what our an- 
cestors used to call ''antiquity" is almost indis- 
tinguishable from the present day. If our concep- 
tion of history takes in the beast-like man whose 
sole tool and weapon was the stone fist-hatchet, 
and his advanced successors, the man who etched 
on bone pictures of the mammoth, the reindeer, 
and the wild horse, in what is now France, and 
the man who painted pictures of bison in the 
burial caves of what is now Spain ; if we also con- 
ceive in their true position our "contemporane- 
ous ancestors," the savages who are now no more 
advanced than the cave-dwellers of a hundred 
thousand or two himdred thousand years back, 
then we shall accept Thothmes and Cassar, Alfred 
and Washington, Timoleon and Lincoln, Homer 
and Shakespeare, Pythagoras and Emerson, as all 
nearly contemporaneous in time and in culture. 

The great historian of the future will have easy 
access to innumerable facts patiently gathered by 
tens of thousands of investigators, whereas the 
great historian of the past had very few facts, 
and often had to gather most of these himself. The 
great historian of the future can not be excused if 
he fails to draw on the vast storehouses of knowl- 
edge that have been accumulated, if he fails to 
profit by the wisdom and work of other men, 
which are now the common property of all intel- 
ligent men. He must use the instruments which 



i6 HISTORY AS LITERATURE 

the historians of the past did not have ready to 
hand. Yet even with these instruments he can 
not do as good work as the best of the elder his- 
torians unless he has vision and imagination, the 
power to grasp what is essential and to reject the 
infinitely more numerous non-essentials, the power 
to embody ghosts, to put flesh and blood on dry 
bones, to make dead men living before our eyes. 
In short, he must have the power to take the 
science of history and turn it into literature. 

Those who wish history to be treated as a purely 
utilitarian science often decry the recital of the 
mighty deeds of the past, the deeds which always 
have aroused, and for a long period to come are 
likely to arouse, most interest. These men say 
that we should study not the unusual but the 
usual. They say that we profit most by laborious 
research into the drab monotony of the ordinary, 
rather than by fixing our eyes on the purple 
patches that break it. Beyond all question the 
great historian of the future must keep ever in 
mind the relative importance of the usual and the 
unusual. If he is a really great historian, if he 
possesses the highest imaginative and literary 
quality, he will be able to interest us in the gray 
tints of the general landscape no less than in the 
flame hues of the jutting peaks. It is even more 
essential to have such quality in writing of the 
commonplace than in writing of the exceptional. 



HISTORY AS LITERATURE 17 

Otherwise no profit will come from study of the 
ordinary; for writings are useless unless they are 
read, and they can not be read unless they are 
readable. Furthermore, while doing full justice 
to the importance of the usual, of the common- 
place, the great historian will not lose sight of the 
importance of the heroic. 

It is hard to tell just what it is that is most im- 
portant to know. The wisdom of one generation 
may seem the folly of the next. This is just as 
true of the wisdom of the dry-as-dusts as of the 
wisdom of those who write interestingly. More- 
over, while the value of the by-products of knowl- 
edge does not readily yield itself to quantitative 
expression, it is none the less real. A utilitarian 
education should undoubtedly be the foundation 
of all education. But it is far from advisable, 
it is far from wise, to have it the end of all educa- 
tion. Technical training will more and more be 
accepted as the prime factor in our educational 
system, a factor as essential for the farmer, the 
blacksmith, the seamstress, and the cook, as for 
the lawyer, the doctor, the engineer, and the ste- 
nographer. For similar reasons the purely practi- 
cal and technical lessons of history, the lessons 
that help us to grapple with our immediate social 
and industrial problems, will also receive greater 
emphasis than ever before. But if we are wise 
we will no more permit this practical training to 



1 8 HISTORY AS LITERATURE 

exclude knowledge of that part of literature which 
is history than of that part of literature which is 
poetry. Side by side with the need for the per- 
fection of the individual in the technic of his 
special calling goes the need of broad human sym- 
pathy, and the need of lofty and generous emotion 
in that individual. Only thus can the citizenship 
of the modem state rise level to the complex 
modem social needs. 

No technical training, no narrowly utilitarian 
study of any kind will meet this second class of 
needs. In part they can best be met by a train- 
ing that will fit men and women to appreciate, 
and therefore to profit by, great poetry and those 
great expressions of the historian and the states- 
man which rivet our interest and stir our souls. 
Great thoughts match and inspire heroic deeds. 
The same reasons that make the Gettysburg speech 
and the Second Inaugural impress themselves on 
men's minds far more deeply than technical 
treatises on the constitutional justification of 
slavery or of secession, apply to fitting descrip- 
tions of the great battle and the great contest 
which occasioned the two speeches. The tense 
epic of the Gettysburg fight, the larger epic of the 
whole Civil War, when truthfully and vividly 
portrayed, will always have, and ought always to 
have, an attraction, an interest, that can not be 
roused by the description of the same number of 



HISTORY AS LITERATURE 19 

hours or years of ordinary existence. There are 
supreme moments in which intensity and not 
duration is the all-important element. History 
which is not professedly utilitarian, history which 
is didactic only as great poetry is unconsciously 
didactic, may yet possess that highest form of 
usefulness, the power to thrill the souls of men with 
stories of strength and craft and daring, and to 
lift them out of their common selves to the heights 
of high endeavor. 

The greatest historian should also be a great 
moralist. It is no proof of impartiality to treat 
wickedness and goodness as on the same level. 
But of course the obsession of purposeful moral 
teaching may utterly defeat its own aim. More- 
over, unfortunately, the avowed teacher of moral- 
ity, when he writes history, sometimes goes very 
far wrong indeed. It often happens that the man 
who can be of real help in inspiring others by his 
utterances on abstract principles is wholly un- 
able to apply his own principles to concrete cases. 
Carlyle offers an instance in point. Very few men 
have ever been a greater source of inspiration to 
other ardent souls than was Carlyle when he con- 
fined himself to preaching morality in the abstract. 
Moreover, his theory bade him treat history as 
offering material to support that theory. But 
not only was he utterly unable to distinguish 
either great virtues or great vices when he looked 



20 HISTORY AS LITERATURE 

abroad on contemporary life — as witness his at- 
titude toward our own Civil War — but he was 
utterly unable to apply his own principles con- 
cretely in history. His "Frederick the Great" is 
literature of a high order. It may, with reserva- 
tions, even be accepted as history. But the 
"morality" therein jubilantly upheld is shocking 
to any man who takes seriously Carlyle's other 
writings in which he lays down principles of con- 
duct. In his "Frederick the Great" he was not 
content to tell the facts. He was not content to 
announce his admiration. He wished to square 
himself with his theories, and to reconcile what 
he admired, both with the actual fact and with 
his previously expressed convictions on morality. 
He could only do so by refusing to face the facts 
and by using words with meanings that shifted to 
meet his own mental emergencies. He pretended 
to discern morality where no vestige of it existed. 
He tortured the facts to support his views. The 
"morality" he praised had no connection with 
morality as understood in the New Testament. 
It was the kind of archaic morality observed by 
the Danites in their dealings with the people of 
Laish. The sermon of the Mormon bishop in 
Owen Wister's "Pilgrim on the Gila" sets forth 
the only moral lessons which it was possible for 
Carlyle truthfully to draw from the successes he 
described. 



HISTORY AS LITERATURE 21 

History must not be treated as something set 
off by itself. It should not be treated as a branch 
of learning bound to the past by the shackles 
of an iron conservatism. It is neither necessary 
rigidly to mark the limits of the province of history, 
nor to treat of all that is within that province, nor 
to exclude any subject within that province from 
treatment, nor yet to treat different methods of 
dealing with the same subject as mutually ex- 
clusive. Every writer and every reader has his 
own needs, to meet himself or to be met by others. 
Among a great multitude of thoughtful people 
there is room for the widest possible variety of 
appeals. Let each man fearlessly choose what is 
of real importance and interest to him personally, 
reverencing authority, but not in a superstitious 
spirit, because he must needs reverence liberty 
even more. 

There is an infinite variety of subjects to treat, 
and no need to estimate their relative importance. 
Because one man is interested in the history of 
finance, it does not mean that another is wrong 
in being interested in the history of war. One 
man's need is met by exhaustive tables of sta- 
tistics; another's by the study of the influence 
exerted on national life by the great orators, the 
Websters and Burkes, or by the poets, the Tyr- 
taeuses and Korners, who in crises utter what is 
in the nation's heart. There is need of the study 
of the historical workings of representative gov- 



22 HISTORY AS LITERATURE 

emment. There is no less need of the study of 
the economic changes produced by the factory 
system. Because we study with profit what 
Thorold Rogers wrote of prices we are not de- 
barred from also profiting by Mahan's studies of 
naval strategy. One man finds what is of most 
importance to his own mind and heart in tracing 
the effect upon humanity of the spread of malaria 
along the shores of the ^gean; or the effect of 
the Black Death on the labor-market of mediaeval 
Europe; or the profound influence upon the de- 
velopment of the African continent of the fatal 
diseases borne by the bites of insects, which close 
some districts to himian life and others to the 
beasts without which humanity rests at the lowest 
stage of savagery. One man sees the events 
from one view-point, one from another. Yet an- 
other can combine both. We can be stirred by 
Thayer's study of Cavour without abating our 
pleasure in the younger Trevelyan's volumes on 
Garibaldi. Because we revel in Froissart, or Join- 
ville, or Villehardouin, there is no need that we 
should lack interest in the books that attempt the 
more difficult task of tracing the economic changes 
in the status of peasant, mechanic, and burgher 
during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. 

History must welcome the entrance upon its 
domain of every science. As James Harvey Rob- 
inson in his **New History" has said: 

''The bounds of all departments of human re- 



HISTORY AS LITERATURE 23 

search and speculation are inherently provisional, 
indefinite, and fluctuating; moreover, the lines of 
demarcation are hopelessly interlaced, for real 
men and the real universe in which they live are 
so intricate as to defy all attempts even of the 
most patient and subtle German to establish sat- 
isfactorily and permanently the Begriff und Wesen 
of any artificially delimited set of natural phenom- 
ena, whether words, thoughts, deeds, forces, ani- 
mals, plants, or stars. Each so-called science 
or discipline is ever and always dependent on 
other sciences and disciplines. It draws its life 
from them, and to them it owes, consciously or 
imconsciously, a great part of its chances of prog- 
ress." 

Elsewhere this writer dwells on the need of 
imderstanding the genetic side of history, if we 
are to grasp the real meaning of, and grapple most 
effectively with, the phenomena of our present- 
day lives; for that which is can be dealt with 
best if we realize at least in part from what a 
tangled web of causation it has spnmg. 

The work of the archaeologist, the work of the 
anthropologist, the work of the palaeo-ethnologist 
— out of all these a great literary historian may 
gather material indispensable for his use. He, and 
we, ought fully to acknowledge our debt to the 
collectors of these indispensable facts. The in- 
vestigator in any line may do work which puts us 



24 HISTORY AS LITERATURE 

all under lasting obligations to him, even though 
he be totally deficient in the art of literary expres- 
sion, that is, totally deficient in the ability to con- 
vey vivid and lifelike pictures to others of the 
past whose secrets he has laid bare. I would give 
no scanty or grudging acknowledgment to the 
deeds of such a man. He does a lasting service; 
whereas the man who tries to make literary ex- 
pression cover his ignorance or misreading of facts 
renders less than no service. But the service done 
is immeasurably increased in value when the man 
arises who from his study of a myriad dead frag- 
ments is able to paint some living picture of the 
past. 

This is why the record as great writers preserve 
it has a value immeasurably beyond what is 
merely lifeless. Such a record pulses with im- 
mortal life. It may recount the deed or the 
thought of a hero at some supreme moment. It 
may be merely the portrayal of homely every-day 
life. This matters not, so long as in either event 
the genius of the historian enables him to paint in 
colors that do not fade. The cry of the Ten 
Thousand when they first saw the sea still stirs 
the hearts of men. The ruthless death scene be- 
tween Jehu and Jezebel; wicked Ahab, smitten by 
the chance arrow, and propped in his chariot until 
he died at sundown ; Josiah, losing his life because 
he would not heed the Pharaoh's solemn warning, 



HISTORY AS LITERATURE 25 

and mourned by all the singing men and all the 
singing women — the fates of these kings and of 
this king's daughter, are part of the common stock 
of knowledge of mankind. They were petty rulers 
of petty principalities; yet, compared with them, 
mighty conquerors, who added empire to empire, 
Shalmaneser and Sargon, Amenhotep and Rameses, 
are but shadows; for the deeds and the deaths of 
the kings of Judah and Israel are written in words 
that, once read, can not be forgotten. The Pelo- 
ponnesian War bulks of unreal size to-day be- 
cause it once seemed thus to bulk to a master 
mind. Only a great historian can fittingly deal 
with a very great subject; yet because the qual- 
ities of chief interest in human history can be 
shown on a small field no less than on a large one, 
some of the greatest historians have treated sub- 
jects that only their own genius rendered great. 

So true is this that if great events lack a great 
historian, and a great poet writes about them, it is 
the poet who fixes them in the mind of mankind, 
so that in after-time importance the real has be- 
come the shadow and the shadow the reality. 
Shakespeare has definitely fixed the character of 
the Richard III of whom ordinary men think and 
speak. Keats forgot even the right name of the 
man who first saw the Pacific Ocean; yet it is 
his lines which leap to our minds when we think 
of the ''wild surmise" felt by the indomitable 



26 HISTORY AS LITERATURE 

explorer-conqueror from Spain when the vast new 
sea burst on his vision. 

When, however, the great historian has spoken, 
his work will never be undone. No poet can 
ever supersede what Napier wrote of the storm- 
ing of Badajoz, of the British infantry at Albuera, 
and of the light artillery at Fuentes d'Oiioro. 
After Parkman had written of Montcalm and 
Wolfe there was left for other writers only what 
Fitzgerald left for other translators of Omar 
Khayyam. Much new light has been thrown on 
the history of the Byzantine Empire by the many 
men who have studied it of recent years; we read 
each new writer with pleasure and profit; and 
after reading each we take down a volume of 
Gibbon, with renewed thankfulness that a great 
writer was moved to do a great task. 

The greatest of future archaeologists will be the 
great historian who instead of being a mere an- 
tiquarian delver in dust-heaps has the genius 
to reconstruct for us the immense panorama of 
the past. He must possess knowledge. He must 
possess that without which knowledge is of so 
little use, wisdom. What he brings from the 
charnel-house he must use with such potent wiz- 
ardry that we shall see the life that was and not 
the death that is. For remember that the past 
was life just as much as the present is life. Whether 
it be Egypt, or Mesopotamia, or Scandinavia with 



HISTORY AS LITERATURE 27 

which he deals, the great historian, if the facts 
permit him, will put before us the men and women 
as they actually lived so that we shall recognize 
them for what they were, living beings. Men like 
Maspero, Breasted, and Weigall have already be- 
gun this work for the countries of the Nile and 
the Euphrates. For Scandinavia the groundwork 
was laid long ago in the ''Heimskringla" and in 
such sagas as those of Burnt Njal and Gisli 
Soursop. Minute descriptions of mummies and of 
the furniture of tombs help us as little to under- 
stand the Egypt of the mighty days, as to sit 
inside the tomb of Moimt Vernon would help us 
to see Washington the soldier leading to battle 
his scarred and tattered veterans, or Washington 
the statesman, by his serene strength of char- 
acter, rendering it possible for his coimtrymen to 
establish themselves as one great nation. 

The great historian must be able to paint for 
us the life of the plain people, the ordinary men 
and women, of the time of which he writes. He 
can do this only if he possesses the highest kind of 
imagination. Collections of figures no more give 
us a picture of the past than the reading of a 
tariff report on hides or woollens gives us an idea 
of the actual lives of the men and women who live 
on ranches or work in factories. The great his- 
torian will in as full measure as possible present 
to us the every- day life of the men and women of 



28 HISTORY AS LITERATURE 

the age which he describes. Nothing that tells 
of this life will come amiss to him. The instru- 
ments of their labor and the weapons of their war- 
fare, the wills that they wrote, the bargains that 
they made, and the songs that they sang when 
they feasted and made love : he must use them all. 
He must tell us of the toil of the ordinary man in 
ordinary times, and of the play by which that 
ordinary toil was broken. He must never forget 
that no event stands out entirely isolated. He 
must trace from its obscure and humble begin- 
nings each of the movements that in its hour of 
triumph has shaken the world. 

Yet he must not forget that the times that are 
extraordinary need especial portrayal. In the 
revolt against the old tendency of historians to 
deal exclusively with the spectacular and the ex- 
ceptional, to treat only of war and oratory and 
government, many modern writers have gone to 
the opposite extreme. They fail to realize that 
in the lives of nations as in the lives of men there 
are hours so fraught with weighty achievement, 
with triumph or defeat, with joy or sorrow, that 
each such hour may determine all the years that 
are to come thereafter, or may outweigh all the 
years that have gone before. In the writings of 
our historians, as in the lives of our ordinary 
citizens, we can neither afford to forget that it 
is the ordinary every-day life which counts most; 



HISTORY AS LITERATURE 29 

nor yet that seasons come when ordinary qualities 
count for but little in the face of great contending 
forces of good and of evil, the outcome of whose 
strife determines whether the nation shall walk 
in the glory of the morning or in the gloom of 
spiritual death. 

The historian must deal with the days of com- 
mon things, and deal with them so that they shall 
interest us in reading of them as our own common 
things interest us as we live among them. He 
must trace the changes that come almost unseen, 
the slow and gradual growth that transforms for 
good or for evil the children and grandchildren so 
that they stand high above or far below the level 
on which their forefathers stood. He must also 
trace the great cataclysms that interrupt and di- 
vert this gradual development. He can no more 
afford to be blind to one class of phenomena than 
to the other. He must ever remember that while 
the worst offence of which he can be guilty is to 
write vividly and inaccurately, yet that unless he 
writes vividly he can not write truthfully ; for no 
amount of dull, painstaking detail will sum up as 
the whole truth unless the genius is there to paint 
the truth. 

There can be no better illustration of what I 
mean than is afforded by the history of Russia 
during the last thousand years. The historian 
must trace the growth of the earliest Slav com- 



30 HISTORY AS LITERATURE 

munities of the forest and the steppe, the infil- 
tration of Scandinavian invaders who gave them 
their first power of mass action, and the slow, 
chaotic development of the little communes into 
barbarous cities and savage princedoms. In later 
Russian history he must show us priest and 
noble, merchant and serf, changing slowly from 
the days when Ivan the Terrible warred against 
Batory, the Magyar king of Poland, until the 
present moment, when with half -suspicious eyes 
the people of the Czar watch their remote Bul- 
garian kinsmen standing before the last European 
stronghold of the Turk. During all these cen- 
turies there were multitudes of wars, foreign and 
domestic, any or all of which were of little moment 
compared to the slow working of the various forces 
that wrought in the times of peace. But there 
was one period of storm and overthrow so ter- 
rible that it affected profoundly for all time the 
whole growth of the Russian people, in inmost 
character no less than in external dominion. 
Early in the thirteenth century the genius of 
Jenghiz Khan stirred the Mongol horsemen of the 
mid-Asian pastures to a movement as terrible to 
civilization as the lava flow of a volcano to the 
lands around the volcano's foot. When that cen- 
tury opened, the Mongols were of no more weight 
in the world than the Touaregs of the Sahara are 
to-day. Long before the centtiry had closed they 



HISTORY AS LITERATURE 31 

had ridden from the Yellow Sea to the Adriatic 
and the Persian Gulf. They had crushed Chris- 
tian and Moslem and Buddhist alike beneath the 
iron cruelty of their sway. They had conquered 
China as their successors conquered India. They 
sacked Baghdad, the seat of the Caliph. In mid- 
Europe their presence for a moment caused the 
same horror to fall on the warring adherents of 
the Pope and the Kaiser. To Europe they were a 
scourge so frightful, so irresistible, that the people 
cowered before them as if they had been demons. 
No European army of that day, of any nation, 
was able to look them in the face on a stricken 
field. Bestial in their lives, irresistible in battle, 
merciless in victory, they trampled the lands over 
which they rode into bloody mire beneath the 
hoofs of their horses. The squat, slit-eyed, brawny 
horse-bowmen drew a red furrow across Hungary, 
devastated Poland, and in Silesia overthrew the 
banded chivalry of Germany. But it was in 
Russia that they did their worst. They not 
merely conquered Russia, but held the Russians 
as cowering and abject serfs for two centuries. 
Every feeble effort at resistance was visited with 
such bloodthirsty vengeance that finally no Rus- 
sian ventured ever to oppose them at all. But 
the princes of the cities soon found that the beast- 
like fury of the conquerors when their own de- 
sires were thwarted, was only equalled by their 



32 HISTORY AS LITERATURE 

beast-like indifference to all that was done among 
the conquered people themselves, and that they 
were ever ready to hire themselves out to aid each 
Russian against his brother. Under this regime 
the Russian who rose was the Russian who with 
cringing servility to his Tartar overlords com- 
bined ferocious and conscienceless greed in the 
treatment of his fellow Russians. Moscow came 
to the front by using the Tartar to help conquer 
the other Russian cities, paying as a price abject 
obedience to all Tartar demands. In the long 
run the fierce and pliant cunning of the conquered 
people proved too much for the short-sighted and 
arrogant brutality of the conquerors. The Tar- 
tar power, the Mongolian power, waned. Russia 
became united, threw off the yoke, and herself 
began a career of aggression at the expense of her 
former conquerors. But the reconquest of racial 
independence, vitally necessary though it was to 
Russia, had been paid for by the establishment 
of a despotism Asiatic rather than European in its 
spirit and working. 

The true historian will bring the past before 
our eyes as if it were the present. He will make 
us see as living men the hard-faced archers of 
Agincourt, and the war-worn spearmen who fol- 
lowed Alexander down beyond the rim of the 
known world. We shall hear grate on the coast 
of Britain the keels of the Low-Dutch sea-thieves 



HISTORY AS LITERATURE 33 

whose children's children were to inherit unknown 
continents. We shall thrill to the triumphs of 
Hannibal. Gorgeous in our sight will rise the 
splendor of dead cities, and the might of the elder 
empires of which the very ruins crumbled to dust 
ages ago. Along ancient trade-routes, across the 
world's waste spaces, the caravans shall move; 
and the admirals of uncharted seas shall furrow 
the oceans with their lonely prows. Beyond the 
dim centuries we shall see the banners float above 
armed hosts. We shall see conquerors riding 
forward to victories that have changed the course 
of time. We shall listen to the prophecies of for- 
gotten seers. Ours shall be the dreams of dreamers 
who dreamed greatly, who saw in their vision peaks 
so lofty that never yet have they been reached 
by the sons and daughters of men. Dead poets 
shall sing to us the deeds of men of might and 
the love and the beauty of women. We shall see 
the dancing girls of Memphis. The scent of the 
flowers in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon will be 
heavy to our senses. We shall sit at feast with the 
kings of Nineveh when they drink from ivory and 
gold. With Queen Maeve in her sun-parlor we 
shall watch the nearing chariots of the champions. 
For us the war-horns of King Olaf shall wail 
across the flood, and the harps sound high at 
festivals in forgotten halls. The frowning strong- 
holds of the barons of old shall rise before us, and 



34 HISTORY AS LITERATURE 

the white palace-castles from whose windows 
Syrian princes once looked across the blue ^^gean. 
We shall know the valor of the two-sworded 
Samurai. Ours shall be the hoary wisdom and 
the strange, crooked folly of the immemorial civ- 
ilizations which tottered to a living death in 
India and in China. We shall see the terrible 
horsemen of Timur the Lame ride over the roof 
of the world ; we shall hear the drums beat as the 
armies of Gustavus and Frederick and Napoleon 
drive forward to victory. Ours shall be the woe 
of burgher and peasant, and ours the stem joy 
when freemen triumph and justice comes to her 
own. The agony of the galley-slaves shall be 
ours, and the rejoicing when the wicked are 
brought low and the men of evil days have their 
reward. We shall see the glory of triumphant 
violence, and the revel of those who do wrong in 
high places; and the broken-hearted despair that 
lies beneath the glory and the revel. We shall 
also see the supreme righteousness of the wars 
for freedom and justice, and know that the men 
who fell in these wars made all mankind their 
debtors. 

Some day the historians will tell us of these 
things. Some day, too, they will tell our chil- 
dren of the age and the land in which we now live. 
They will portray the conquest of the continent. 
They will show the slow beginnings of settlement, 



HISTORY AS LITERATURE 35 

the growth of the fishing and trading towns on 
the seacoast, the hesitating early ventures into 
the Indian-haunted forest. Then they will show 
the backwoodsmen, with their long rifles and their 
light axes, making their way with labor and peril 
through the wooded wilderness to the Mississippi; 
and then the endless march of the white-topped 
wagon-trains across plain and mountain to the 
coast of the greatest of the five great oceans. They 
will show how the land which the pioneers won 
slowly and with incredible hardship was filled in 
two generations by the overflow from the countries 
of western and central Europe. The portentous 
growth of the cities will be shown, and the change 
from a nation of farmers to a nation of business 
men and artisans, and all the far-reaching conse- 
quences of the rise of the new industrialism. The 
formation of a new ethnic type in this melting-pot 
of the nations will be told. The hard materialism 
of our age will appear, and also the strange capac- 
ity for lofty idealism which must be reckoned 
with by all who would imderstand the American 
character. A people whose heroes are Washing- 
ton and Lincoln, a peaceful people who fought to 
a finish one of the bloodiest of wars, waged solely 
for the sake of a great principle and a noble idea, 
siu-ely possess an emergency-standard far above 
mere money-getting. 

Those who tell the Americans of the future 



36 HISTORY AS LITERATURE 

what the Americans of to-day and of yesterday 
have done, will perforce tell much that is un- 
pleasant. This is but saying that they will de- 
scribe the arch-typical civilization of this age. 
Nevertheless, when the tale is finally told, I be- 
lieve that it will show that the forces working for 
good in our national life outweigh the forces 
working for evil, and that, with many blunders and 
shortcomings, with much halting and turning 
aside from the path, we shall yet in the end prove 
our faith by our works, and show in our lives 
our belief that righteousness exalteth a nation. 



BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES IN 
HISTORY 



BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES IN 
HISTORY 1 

4 N American who, in response to such an in- 
r\ vitation as I have received, speaks in this 
university of ancient renown, can not but 
feel with peculiar vividness the interest and charm 
of his surroundings, fraught as they are with a 
thousand associations. Your great imiversities, 
and all the memories that make them great, are 
living realities in the minds of scores of thousands 
of men who have never seen them and who dwell 
across the seas in other lands. Moreover, these 
associations are no stronger in the men of English 
stock than in those who are not. My people 
have been for eight generations in America; but 
in one thing I am like the Americans of to-mor- 
row, rather than like many of the Americans of 
to-day; for I have in my veins the blood of men 
who came from many different European races. 
The ethnic make-up of our people is slowly chan- 
ging, so that constantly the race tends to become 
more and more akin to that of those Americans 

^ Delivered at Oxford, June 7, 1910. This was the Romanes 
Lecture for 19 10. 

39 



40 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 

who like myself are of the old stock but not 
mainly of English stock. Yet I think that, as 
time goes by, mutual respect, imderstanding, and 
sympathy among the English-speaking peoples 
grow greater and not less. Any of my ancestors, 
Hollander or Huguenot, Scotchman or Irishman, 
who had come to Oxford in ''the spacious days 
of great Elizabeth," would have felt far more 
alien than I, their descendant, now feel. Com- 
mon heirship in the things of the spirit makes a 
closer bond than common heirship in the things of 
the body. 

More than ever before in the world's history 
we of to-day seek to penetrate the causes of the 
mysteries that surroimd not only mankind but 
all life, both in the present and the past. We 
search, we peer, we see things dimly; here and 
there we get a ray of clear vision, as we look be- 
fore and after. We study the tremendous pro- 
cession of the ages, from the immemorial past 
when in "cramp elf and saurian forms" the cre- 
ative forces ''swathed their too-much power," 
down to the yesterday, a few score thousand years 
distant only, when the history of man became the 
overwhelming fact in the history of life on this 
planet; and studying we see strange analogies 
in the phenomena of life and death, of birth, 
growth, and change, between those physical 
groups of animal life which we designate as 



BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 41 

species, forms, races, and the highly complex and 
composite entities which rise before our minds 
when we speak of nations and civilizations. 

It is this study which has given science its 
present-day prominence. In the world of intel- 
lect, doubtless, the most marked features in the 
history of the past century have been the ex- 
traordinary advances in scientific knowledge and 
investigation, and in the position held by the 
men of science with reference to those engaged in 
other pursuits. I am not now speaking of ap- 
plied science; of the science, for instance, which, 
having revolutionized transportation on the earth 
and the water, is now on the brink of carrying it 
into the air; of the science that finds its expres- 
sion in such extraordinary achievements as the 
telephone and the telegraph; of the sciences 
which have so accelerated the velocity of move- 
ment in social and industrial conditions — for the 
changes in the mechanical appliances of ordinary 
life during the last three generations have been 
greater than in all the preceding generations 
since history dawned. I speak of the science 
which has no more direct bearing upon the affairs 
of our every-day life than literature or music, 
painting or sculpture, poetry or history. A hun- 
dred years ago the ordinary man of cultivation 
had to know something of these last subjects; 
but the probabilities were rather against his hav- 



42 



BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 



ing any but the most superficial scientific knowl- 
edge. At present all this has changed, thanks 
to the interest taken in scientific discoveries, the 
large circulation of scientific books, and the rapid- 
ity with which ideas originating among students 
of the most advanced and abstruse sciences be- 
come, at least partially, domiciled in the popular 
mind. 

Another feature of the change, of the grov/th 
in the position of science in the eyes of every 
one, and of the greatly increased respect naturally 
restilting for scientific methods, has been a cer- 
tain tendency for scientific students to encroach 
on other fields. This is particularly true of the 
field of historical study. Not only have scientific 
men insisted upon the necessity of considering 
the history of man, especially in its early stages, 
in connection with what biology shows to be the 
history of life, but furthermore there has arisen 
a demand that history shall itself be treated as a 
science. Both positions are in their essence right ; 
but as regards each position, the more arrogant 
among the invaders of the new realm of knowledge 
take an attitude to which it is not necessary to 
assent. As regards the latter of the two posi- 
tions, that which would treat history henceforth 
merely as one branch of scientific study, we must 
of course cordially agree that accuracy in record- 
ing facts and appreciation of their relative worth 



BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 43 

and interrelationship are just as necessary in his- 
torical study as in any other kind of study. The 
fact that a book, though interesting, is untrue, 
of course removes it at once from the category 
of history, however much it may still deserve to 
retain a place in the always desirable group of 
volumes which deal with entertaining fiction. 
But the converse also holds, at least to the extent 
of permitting us to insist upon what would seem 
to be the elementary fact that a book which is 
written to be read should be readable. This 
rather obvious truth seems to have been forgotten 
by some of the more zealous scientific historians, 
who apparently hold that the worth of a his- 
torical book is directly in proportion to the im- 
possibility of reading it, save as a painful duty. 
Now I am willing that history shall be treated as 
a branch of science, but only on condition that 
it also remains a branch of literature; and, fur- 
thermore, I believe that as the field of science 
encroaches on the field of literature there should 
be a corresponding encroachment of literature 
upon science; and I hold that one of the great 
needs, which can only be met by very able men 
whose ctilture is broad enough to include litera- 
ture as well as science, is the need of books for 
scientific laymen. We need a literature of science 
which shall be readable. So far from doing 
away with the school of great historians, the 



44 



BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 



school of Polybius and Tacitus, Gibbon and Ma- 
caulay, we need merely that the future writers 
of history, without losing the qualities which 
have made these men great, shall also utilize the 
new facts and new methods which science has 
put at their disposal. Dryness is not in itself a 
measure of value. No ''scientific" treatise about 
St. Louis will displace Joinville, for the very rea- 
son that Joinville 's place is in both history and 
literature; no minute study of the Napoleonic 
wars will teach us more than Marbot — and Mar- 
bot is as interesting as Walter Scott. Moreover, 
certain at least of the branches of science should 
likewise be treated by masters in the art of pre- 
sentment, so that the layman interested in science, 
no less than the layman interested in history, shall 
have on his shelves classics which can be read. 
Whether this wish be or be not capable of realiza- 
tion, it assuredly remains true that the great his- 
torian of the future must essentially represent the 
ideal striven after by the great historians of the 
past. The industrious collector of facts occupies 
an honorable, but not an exalted, position, and 
the scientific historian who produces books which 
are not literature must rest content with the honor, 
substantial, but not of the highest type, that be- 
longs to him who gathers material which some 
time some great master shall arise to use. 

Yet, while freely conceding all that can be said 



BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 45 

of the masters of literature, we must insist upon 
the historian of mankind working in the scientific 
spirit, and using the treasure-houses of science. 
He who would fully treat of man must know at 
least something of biology, of the science that 
treats of living, breathing things; and especially 
of that science of evolution which is inseparably 
connected with the great name of Darwin. Of 
course, there is no exact parallelism between the 
birth, growth, and death of species in the animal 
world, and the birth, growth, and death of soci- 
eties in the world of man. Yet there is a certain 
parallelism. There are strange analogies; it may 
be that there are homologies. 

How far the resemblances between the two sets 
of phenomena are more than accidental, how far 
biology can be used as an aid in the interpretation 
of human history, we can not at present say. The 
historian should never forget, what the highest 
type of scientific man is always teaching us to 
remember, that willingness to admit ignorance is 
a prime factor in developing wisdom out of knowl- 
edge. Wisdom is advanced by research which 
enables us to add to knowledge; and, moreover, 
the way for wisdom is made ready when men who 
record facts of vast but unknown import, if asked 
to explain their full significance, are willing 
frankly to answer that they do not know. The 
research which enables us to add to the sum of 



46 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 

complete knowledge stands first; but second only 
stands the research which, while enabling us 
clearly to pose the problem, also requires us to 
say that with our present knowledge we can offer 
no complete solution. 

Let me illustrate what I mean by an instance 
or two taken from one of the most fascinating 
branches of world-history, the history of the higher 
forms of life, of mammalian life, on this globe. 

Geologists and astronomers are not agreed as 
to the length of time necessary for the changes 
that have taken place. At any rate, many hun- 
dreds of thousands of years, some millions of 
years, have passed by since in the eocene, at the 
beginning of the tertiary period, we find the 
traces of an abundant, varied, and highly devel- 
oped mammalian life on the land masses out of 
which have grown the continents as we see them 
to-day. The ages swept by, until, with the advent 
of man substantially in the physical shape in 
which we now know him, we also find a mamma- 
lian fauna not essentially different in kind, though 
widely differing in distribution, from that of the 
present day. Throughout this immense period 
form succeeds form, type succeeds type, in obedi- 
ence to laws of evolution, of progress and retro- 
gression, of development and death, which we as 
yet understand only in the most imperfect manner. 
As knowledge increases our wisdom is often 



BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 47 

turned into foolishness, and many of the phenom- 
ena of evolution which seemed clearly explicable 
to the learned master of science who founded these 
lectures, to us nowadays seem far less satisfac- 
torily explained. The scientific men of most note 
now differ widely in their estimates of the relative 
parts played in evolution by natural selection, by 
mutation, by the inheritance of acquired char- 
acteristics; and we study their writings with a 
growing impression that there are forces at work 
which our blinded eyes wholly fail to apprehend; 
and where this is the case the part of wisdom is 
to say that we believe we have such and such par- 
tial explanations, but that we are not warranted 
in saying that we have the whole explanation. 
In tracing the history of the development of 
faunal life during this period, the age of mam- 
mals, there are some facts which are clearly es- 
tablished, some great and sweeping changes for 
which we can with certainty ascribe reasons. 
There are other facts as to which we grope in the 
dark, and vast changes, vast catastrophes, of which 
we can give no adequate explanation. 

Before illustrating these types, let us settle 
one or two matters of terminology. In the 
changes, the development and extinction, of 
species we must remember that such expressions 
as "a new species," or as "a species becoming 
extinct," are each commonly and indiscrimi- 



48 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 

nately used to express totally different and oppo- 
site meanings. Of course the *'new" species is 
not new in the sense that its ancestors appeared 
later on the globe's surface than those of any old 
species tottering to extinction. Phylogenetically, 
each animal now living must necessarily trace its 
ancestral descent back through countless genera- 
tions, through eons of time, to the early stages of 
the appearance of life on the globe. All that 
we mean by a "new" species is that from some 
cause, or set of causes, one of these ancestral 
stems slowly or suddenly develops into a form 
unlike any that has preceded it ; so that, while in 
one form of life the ancestral type is continuously 
repeated and the old species continues to exist, 
in another form of life there is a deviation from 
the ancestral type and a new species appears. 

Similarly, "extinction of species" is a term 
which has two entirely different meanings. The 
type may become extinct by dying out and leav- 
ing no descendants. Or it may die out because 
as the generations go by there is change, slow 
or swift, until a new form is produced. Thus in 
one case the line of life comes to an end. In 
the other case it changes into something different. 
The huge titanothere, and the small three-toed 
horse, both existed at what may roughly be called 
the same period of the world's history, back in 
the middle of the mammalian age. Both are 



BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 49 

extinct in the sense that each has completely dis- 
appeared and that nothing like either is to be 
found in the world to-day. But whereas all the 
individual titanotheres finally died out, leaving no 
descendants, a number of the three-toed horses 
did leave descendants, and these descendants, con- 
stantly changing as the ages went by, finally de- 
veloped into the highly specialized one-toed horses, 
asses, and zebras of to-day. 

The analogy between the facts thus indicated 
and certain facts in the development of human 
societies is striking. A further analogy is sup- 
plied by a very curious tendency often visible in 
cases of intense and extreme specialization. When 
an animal form becomes highly specialized, the 
type at first, because of its specialization, triumphs 
over its allied rivals and its enemies, and attains 
a great development; until in many cases the 
specialization becomes so extreme that from some 
cause imknown to us, or at which we merely 
guess, it disappears. The new species which 
mark a new era commonly come from the less 
specialized types, the less distinctive, dominant, 
and striking types, of the preceding era. 

When dealing with the changes, cataclysmic 
or gradual, which divide one period of paleonto- 
logical history from another, we can sometimes 
assign causes, and again we can not even guess at 
them. In the case of single species, or of faunas 



50 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 

of very restricted localities, the explanation is 
often self-evident. A comparatively slight change 
in the amount of moisture in the climate, with 
the attendant change in vegetation, might readily 
mean the destruction of a group of huge herbi- 
vores with a bodily size such that they needed a 
vast quantity of food, and with teeth so weak or 
so peculiar that but one or two kinds of plants 
could furnish this food. Again, we now know 
that the most deadly foes of the higher forms of 
life are various lower forms of life, such as in- 
sects, or microscopic creatures conveyed into the 
blood by insects. There are districts in South 
America where many large animals, wild and do- 
mestic, can not live because of the presence either 
of certain ticks or of certain baleful flies. In 
Africa there is a terrible genus of poison fly, each 
species acting as the host of microscopic creatures 
which are deadly to certain of the higher verte- 
brates. One of these species, though harmless to 
man, is fatal to all domestic animals, and this 
although harmless to the closely related wild kins- 
folk of these animals. Another is fatal to man 
himself, being the cause of the ''sleeping-sick- 
ness" which in many large districts has killed out 
the entire population. Of course the develop- 
ment or the extension of the range of any such 
insects, and any one of many other causes which 
we see actually at work around us, would readily 



BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 51 

account for the destruction of some given species 
or even for the destruction of several species in a 
limited area of coimtry. 

When whole faunal groups die out over large 
areas, the question is different, and may or may 
not be susceptible of explanation with the knowl- 
edge we actually possess. In the old arctogasal 
continent, for instance, in what is now Europe, 
Asia, and North America, the glacial period made 
a complete, but of coiurse explicable, change in 
the faunal life of the region. At one time the 
continent held a rich and varied fauna. Then a 
period of great cold supervened, and a different 
faima succeeded the first. The explanation of the 
change is obvious. 

But in many other cases we can not so much 
as hazard a guess at why a given change occurred. 
One of the most striking instances of these inex- 
plicable changes is that afforded by the history of 
South America toward the close of the tertiary 
period. For ages South America had been an 
island by itself, cut off from North America at 
the very time that the latter was at least occa- 
sionally in land communication with Asia. During 
this time a very peculiar fauna grew up in South 
America, some of the types resembling nothing 
now existing, while others are recognizable as 
ancestral forms of the ant-eaters, sloths, and arma- 
dillos of to-day. It was a peculiar and diversified 



52 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 

mammalian fauna, of, on the whole, rather small 
species, and without any representatives of the 
animals with which man has been most familiar 
during his career on this earth. 

Toward the end of the tertiary period there 
was an upheaval of land between this old South 
American island and North America, near what 
is now the Isthmus of Panama, thereby making a 
bridge across which the teeming animal life of the 
northern continent had access to this queer south- 
em continent. There followed an inrush of huge, 
or swift, or formidable creatures which had at- 
tained their development in the fierce competition 
of the arctogaeal realm. Elephants, camels, horses, 
tapirs, swine, sabre-toothed tigers, big cats, 
wolves, bears, deer, crowded into South America, 
warring each against the other incomers and 
against the old long-existing forms. A riot of 
life followed. Not only was the character of the 
South American fauna totally changed by the 
invasion of these creatures from the north, which 
soon swarmed over the continent, but it was also 
changed through the development wrought in the 
old inhabitants by the severe competition to 
which they were exposed. Many of the smaller 
or less capable types died out. Others developed 
enormous bulk or complete armor protection, and 
thereby saved themselves from the new beasts. 
In consequence. South America soon became popu- 



BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 5 3 

lated with various new species of mastodons, 
sabre-toothed tigers, camels, horses, deer, cats, 
wolves, hooved creatures of strange shapes, and 
some of them of giant size, all of these being de- 
scended from the immigrant types; and side by 
side with them there grew up large autochthonus 
vmgulates, giant grotmd-sloths well-nigh as large 
as elephants, and armored creatures as bulky as 
an ox but structurally of the armadillo or ant- 
eater type; and some of these latter not only 
held their own, but actually in their turn wandered 
north over the isthmus and invaded North Amer- 
ica. A fauna as varied as that of Africa to-day, 
as abundant in species and individuals, even more 
noteworthy, because of its huge size or odd type, 
and because of the terrific prowess of the more for- 
midable flesh-eaters, was thus developed in South 
America, and flourished for a period which human 
history would call very long indeed, but which 
geologically was short. 

Then, for no reason that we can assign, destruc- 
tion fell on this fauna. All the great and terrible 
creatures died out, the same fate befalling the 
changed representatives of the old autochthonous 
fauna and the descendants of the migrants that 
had come down from the north. Ground-sloth 
and glyptodon, sabre-tooth, horse and mastodon, 
and all the associated animals of large size van- 
ished, and South America, though still retaining 



54 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 

its connection with North America, once again be- 
came a land with a mammaHan life small and 
weak compared to that of North America and 
the Old World. Its fauna is now marked, for 
instance, by the presence of medium-sized deer 
and cats, fox-like wolves, and small camel-like 
creatures, as well as by the presence of small 
armadillos, sloths, and ant-eaters. In other words, 
it includes diminutive representatives of the giants 
of the preceding era, both of the giants among the 
older forms of mammalia, and of the giants among 
the new and intrusive kinds. The change was 
wide-spread and extraordinary, and with our pres- 
ent means of information it is wholly inexplicable. 
There was no ice age, and it is hard to imagine 
any cause which would account for the extinction 
of so many species of huge or moderate size, while 
smaller representatives, and here and there 
medium-sized representatives, of many of them 
were left. 

Now as to all of these phenomena in the evo- 
lution of species, there are, if not homologies, at 
least certain analogies, in the history of hiiman 
societies, in the history of the rise to prominence, 
of the development and change, of the temporary 
dominance, and death or transformation, of the 
groups of varying kind which form races or nations. 
Here, as in biology, it is necessary to keep in 
mind that we use each of the words "birth" and 



BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 55 

"death," ''youth" and "age," often very loosely, 
and sometimes as denoting either one of two to- 
tally different conceptions. Of course, in one 
sense there is no such thing as an ''old" or a 
"young" nation, any more than there is an "old" 
or "young" family. Phylogenetically, the line of 
ancestral descent must be of exactly the same 
length for every existing individual, and for every 
group of individuals, whether forming a family or 
a nation. All that can properly be meant by the 
terms "new" and "young" is that in a given line 
of descent there has suddenly come a period of 
rapid change. This change may arise either from 
a new development or transformation of the old 
elements, or else from a new grouping of these 
elements with other and varied elements; so that 
the words "new" nation or "young" nation may 
have a real difference of significance in one case 
from what they have in another. 

As in biology, so in human history, a new form 
may result from the specialization of a long- 
existing, and hitherto very slowly changing, gen- 
eralized or non-specialized form; as, for instance, 
occurs when a barbaric race from a variety of 
causes suddenly develops a more complex cultiva- 
tion and civilization. This is what occurred, for 
instance, in western Europe during the centuries 
of the Teutonic and, later, the Scandinavian ethnic 
overflows from the north. All the modem coun- 



56 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 

tries of western Europe are descended from the 
states created by these northern invaders. When 
first created they would be called "new" or 
*' young" states in the sense that part or all of 
the people composing them were descended from 
races that hitherto had not been civilized, and 
that therefore, for the first time, entered on the 
career of civilized communities. In the southern 
part of western Europe the new states thus formed 
consisted in bulk of the inhabitants already in 
the land under the Roman Empire; and it was 
here that the new kingdoms first took shape. 
Through a reflex action their influence then ex- 
tended back into the cold forests from which the 
invaders had come, and Germany and Scandi- 
navia witnessed the rise of communities with es- 
sentially the same civilization as their southern 
neighbors; though in those communities, unlike 
the southern communities, there was no infusion 
of new blood, so that the new civilized nations 
which gradually developed were composed entirely 
of members of the same races which in the same 
regions had for ages lived the life of a slowly chan- 
ging barbarism. The same was true of the Slavs 
and the Slavonized Finns of eastern Europe, 
when an infiltration of Scandinavian leaders from 
the north, and an infiltration of Byzantine cul- 
ture from the south, joined to produce the changes 
which have gradually, out of the little Slav com- 



BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 57 

munities of the forest and the steppe, formed the 
mighty Russian Empire of to-day. 

Again, the new form may represent merely a 
spHtting off from a long-estabHshed, highly de- 
veloped, and specialized nation. In this case the 
nation is usually spoken of as a "young," and is 
correctly spoken of as a ''new," nation; but the 
term should always be used with a clear sense of 
the difference between what is described in such 
case, and what is described by the same term in 
speaking of a civilized nation just developed from 
barbarism. Carthage and Syracuse were new 
cities compared to Tyre and Corinth; but the 
Greek or Phoenician race was in every sense of the 
word as old in the new city as in the old city. 
So, nowadays, Victoria or Manitoba is a new com- 
munity compared with England or Scotland; but 
the ancestral type of civilization and culture is as 
old in one case as in the other. I of course do not 
mean for a moment that great changes are not 
produced by the mere fact that the old civilized 
race is suddenly placed in surroundings where it 
has again to go through the work of taming the 
wilderness, a work finished many centuries before 
in the original home of the race; I merely mean 
that the ancestral history is the same in each case. 
We can rightly use the phrase ''a new people," in 
speaking of Canadians or Australians, Americans 
or Africanders. But we use it in an entirely dif- 



58 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 

ferent sense from that in which we use it when 
speaking of such communities as those founded by 
the Northmen and their descendants during that 
period of astonishing growth which saw the de- 
scendants of the Norse sea-thieves conquer and 
transform Normandy, Sicily, and the British Is- 
lands ; we use it in an entirely different sense from 
that in which we use it when speaking of the new 
states that grew up aroimd Warsaw, Klief, Nov- 
gorod, and Moscow, as the wild savages of the 
steppes and the marshy forests struggled haltingly 
and stumblingly upward to become builders of 
cities and to form stable governments. The king- 
doms of Charlemagne and Alfred were *'new," 
compared to the empire on the Bosphorus; they 
were also in every way different; their lines of 
ancestral descent had nothing in common with 
that of the polyglot realm which paid tribute to 
the Caesars of Byzantium; their social problems 
and after-time history were totally different. This 
is not true of those ''new" nations which spring 
direct from old nations. Brazil, the Argentine, 
the United States, are all "new" nations, com- 
pared with the nations of Europe ; but, with what- 
ever changes in detail, their civilization is never- 
theless of the general European type, as shown 
in Portugal, Spain, and England. The differences 
between these ''new" American and these "old" 
European nations are not as great as those which 



BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 59 

separate the "new" nations one from another, 
and the ''old" nations one from another. There 
are in each case very real differences between the 
new and the old nation; differences both for good 
and for evil; but in each case there is the same 
ancestral history to reckon with, the same type 
of civilization, with its attendant benefits and 
shortcomings; and, after the pioneer stages are 
passed, the problems to be solved, in spite of 
superficial differences, are in their essence the 
same; they are those that confront all civilized 
peoples, not those that confront only peoples 
struggling from barbarism into civilization. 

So, when we speak of the "death" of a tribe, 
a nation, or a civilization, the term may be used 
for either one of two totally different processes, 
the analogy with what occurs in biological history 
being complete. Certain tribes of savages — the 
Tasmanians, for instance, and various little clans 
of American Indians — have within the last cen- 
tury or two completely died out; all of the in- 
dividuals have perished, leaving no descendants, 
and the blood has disappeared. Certain other 
tribes of Indians have as tribes disappeared or are 
now disappearing; but their blood remains, being 
absorbed into the veins of the white intruders, or 
of the black men introduced by those white in- 
truders; so that in reality they are merely being 
transformed into something absolutely different 



6o BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 

from what they were. In the United States, in 
the new State of Oklahoma, the Creeks, Chero- 
kees, Chickasaws, Delawares, and other tribes 
are in process of absorption into the mass of the 
white population; when the State was admitted 
a couple of years ago, one of the two senators, 
and three of the five representatives in Congress, 
were partly of Indian blood. In but a few years 
these Indian tribes will have disappeared as com- 
pletely as those that have actually died out; but 
the disappearance will be by absorption and trans- 
formation into the mass of the American popu- 
lation. 

A like wide diversity in fact may be covered 
in the statement that a civilization has "died 
out." The nationality and culture of the wonder- 
ful city-builders of the lower Mesopotamian Plain 
have completely disappeared, and, though doubt- 
less certain influences dating therefrom are still 
at work, they are in such changed and hidden form 
as to be unrecognizable. But the disappearance 
of the Roman Empire was of no such character. 
There was complete change, far-reaching trans- 
formation, and at one period a violent dislocation ; 
but it would not be correct to speak either of the 
blood or the culture of Old Rome as extinct. We 
are not yet in a position to dogmatize as to the 
permanence or evanescence of the various strains 
of blood that go to make up every civilized na- 



BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 6i 

tionality; but it is reasonably certain that the 
blood of the old Roman still flows through the 
veins of the modem Italian; and though there has 
been much intermixture, from many different 
foreign sources — from foreign conquerors and from 
foreign slaves — yet it is probable that the Italian 
type of to-day finds its dominant ancestral type 
in the ancient Latin. As for the culture, the civili- 
zation of Rome, this is even more true. It has 
suffered a complete transformation, partly by 
natural growth, partly by absorption of totally 
alien elements, such as a Semitic religion, and 
certain Teutonic governmental and social customs ; 
but the process was not one of extinction, but one 
of growth and transformation, both from within 
and by the accretion of outside elements. In 
France and Spain the inheritance of Latin blood 
is small ; but the Roman culture which was forced 
on those countries has been tenaciously retained by 
them, throughout all their subsequent ethnical 
and political changes, as the basis on which their 
civilizations have been built. Moreover, the per- 
manent spreading of Roman influence was not 
limited to Europe. It has extended to and over 
half of that New World which was not even 
dreamed of during the thousand years of brilliant 
life between the birth and the death of pagan 
Rome. This New World was discovered by one 
Italian, and its mainland first reached and named 



62 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 

by another; and in it, over a territory many times 
the size of Trajan's empire, the Spanish, French, 
and Portuguese adventurers founded, beside the 
Saint Lawrence and the Amazon, along the flanks 
of the Andes, and in the shadow of the snow-capped 
volcanoes of Mexico, from the Rio Grande to the 
Straits of Magellan, communities, now flourish- 
ing and growing apace, which in speech and cul- 
ture, and even as regards one strain in their blood, 
are the lineal heirs of the ancient Latin civiliza- 
tion. When we speak of the disappearance, the 
passing away, of ancient Babylon or Nineveh, and 
of ancient Rome, we are using the same terms to 
describe totally different phenomena. 

The anthropologist and historian of to-day real- 
ize much more clearly than their predecessors of 
a couple of generations back, how artiflcal most 
great nationalities are, and how loose is the 
terminology usually employed to describe them. 
There is an element of unconscious and rather 
pathetic humor in the simplicity of half a century 
ago which spoke of the Aryan and the Teuton 
with reverential admiration, as if the words de- 
noted, not merely something definite, but some- 
thing ethnologically sacred; the writers having 
much the same pride and faith in their own and 
their fellow countrymen's purity of descent from 
these imaginary Aryan or Teutonic ancestors that 
was felt a few generations earlier by the various 



BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 63 

noble families who traced their lineage direct to 
Odin, ^neas, or Noah. Nowadays, of course, 
all students recognize that there may not be, and 
often is not, the slightest connection between kin- 
ship in blood and kinship in tongue. In Amer- 
ica we find three races, white, red, and black, 
and three tongues, English, French, and Spanish, 
mingled in such a way that the lines of cleavage 
of race continually run at right angles to the lines 
of cleavage of speech; there being communities 
practically of pure blood of each race found speak- 
ing each language. Aryan and Teutonic are 
terms having very distinct linguistic meanings; 
but whether they have any such ethnical meanings 
as were formerly attributed to them is so doubt- 
ful, that we can not even be sure whether the an- 
cestors of most of those we call Teutons originally 
spoke an Aryan tongue at all. The term Celtic, 
again, is perfectly clear when used linguistically; 
but when used to describe a race it means almost 
nothing until we find out which one of sev- 
eral totally different terminologies the writer or 
speaker is adopting. If, for instance, the term is 
used to designate the short-headed, medium-sized 
type common throughout middle Europe, from 
east to west, it denotes something entirely differ- 
ent from what is meant when the name is applied 
to the tall, yellow-haired opponents of the Ro- 
mans and the later Greeks ; while, if used to des- 



64 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 

ignate any modern nationality, it becomes about 
as loose and meaningless as the term Anglo-Saxon 
itself. 

Most of the great societies which have de- 
veloped a high civilization and have played a 
dominant part in the world have been — and are 
— artificial; not merely in social structure, but 
in the sense of including totally different race 
types. A great nation rarely belongs to any one 
race, though its citizens generally have one es- 
sentially national speech. Yet the curious fact 
remains that these great artificial societies acquire 
such unity that in each one all the parts feel a 
subtle sympathy, and move or cease to move, go 
forward or go back, all together, in response to 
some stir or throbbing, very powerful, and yet not 
to be discerned by our senses. National unity is 
far more apt than race unity to be a fact to reckon 
with; until indeed we come to race differences as 
fundamental as those which divide from one 
another the half-dozen great ethnic divisions of 
mankind, when they become so important that 
differences of nationality, speech, and creed sink 
into littleness. 

An ethnological map of Europe in which the 
peoples were divided according to their physical 
and racial characteristics, such as stature, colora- 
tion, and shape of head, would bear no resem- 
blance whatever to a map giving the political di- 



BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 65 

visions, the nationalities, of Europe ; while, on the 
contrary, a linguistic map would show a general 
correspondence between speech and nationality. 
The northern Frenchman is in blood and physical 
type more nearly allied to his German-speaking 
neighbor than to the Frenchman of the Mediter- 
ranean seaboard; and the latter, in his turn, is 
nearer to the Catalan than to the man who dwells 
beside the Channel or along the tributaries of the 
Rhine. But in essential characteristics, in the 
qualities that tell in the make-up of a nationality, 
all these kinds of Frenchmen feel keenly that they 
are one, and are different from all outsiders, their 
differences dwindling into insignificance compared 
with the extraordinary, artificially produced re- 
semblances which bring them together and wall 
them off from the outside world. The same is 
true when we compare the German who dwells 
where the Alpine springs of the Danube and the 
Rhine interlace, with the physically different Ger- 
man of the Baltic lands. The same is true of 
Kentishman, Comishman, and Yorkshireman in 
England. 

In dealing, not with groups of human beings 
in simple and primitive relations, but with highly 
complex, highly specialized, civilized, or semi- 
civilized societies, there is need of great caution 
in drawing analogies with what has occurred in 
the development of the animal world. Yet even 



66 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 

in these cases it is curious to see how some of the 
phenomena in the growth and disappearance of 
these complex, artificial groups of human beings 
resemble what has happened in myriads of in- 
stances in the history of life on this planet. 

Why do great artificial empires, whose citizens 
are knit by a bond of speech and culture much 
more than by a bond of blood, show periods of 
extraordinary growth, and again of sudden or 
lingering decay? In some cases we can answer 
readily enough; in other cases we can not as yet 
even guess what the proper answer should be. 
If in any such case the centrifugal forces overcome 
the centripetal, the nation will of course fly to 
pieces, and the reason for its failure to become 
a dominant force is patent to every one. The 
minute that the spirit which finds its healthy de- 
velopment in local self-government, and is the 
antidote to the dangers of an extreme centraliza- 
tion, develops into mere particularism, into in- 
ability to combine effectively for achievement of 
a common end, then it is hopeless to expect great 
results. Poland and certain republics of the West- 
em Hemisphere are the standard examples of 
failure of this kind; and the United States would 
have ranked with them, and her name would have 
become a byword of derision, if the forces of union 
had not triumphed in the Civil War. So, the 
growth of soft luxury after it has reached a certain 



BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 67 

point becomes a national danger patent to all. 
Again, it needs but little of the vision of a seer to 
foretell what must happen in any commimity if 
the average woman ceases to become the mother 
of a family of healthy children, if the average man 
loses the will and the power to work up to old age 
and to fight whenever the need arises. If the 
homely commonplace virtues die out, if strength 
of character vanishes in graceful self-indulgence, 
if the virile qualities atrophy, then the nation has 
lost what no material prosperity can offset. 

But there are plenty of other phenomena wholly 
or partially inexplicable. It is easy to see why 
Rome trended downward when great slave-tilled 
farms spread over what had once been a country- 
side of peasant proprietors, when greed and lux- 
ury and sensuality ate like acids into the fibre of 
the upper classes, while the mass of the citizens 
grew to depend not upon their own exertions, but 
upon the state, for their pleasures and their very 
livelihood. But this does not explain why the 
forward movement stopped at different times, so 
far as different matters were concerned; at one 
time as regards literature, at another time as re- 
gards architecture, at another time as regards 
city-building. There is nothing mysterious about 
Rome's dissolution at the time of the barbarian 
invasions; apart from the impoverishment and 
depopulation of the empire, its fall would be 



68 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 

quite sufficiently explained by the mere fact that 
the average citizen had lost the fighting edge — an 
essential even under a despotism, and therefore 
far more essential in free, self-governing com- 
mimities, such as those of the English-speaking 
peoples of to-day. The mystery is rather that 
out of the chaos and corruption of Roman society 
during the last days of the oligarchic republic, 
there should have sprung an empire able to hold 
things with reasonable steadiness for three or 
four centuries. But why, for instance, should the 
higher kinds of literary productiveness have 
ceased about the beginning of the second century, 
whereas the following centuries witnessed a great 
outbreak of energy in the shape of city-building 
in the provinces, not only in western Europe, but 
in Africa? We can not even guess why the springs 
of one kind of energy dried up, while there was yet 
no cessation of another kind. 

Take another and smaller instance, that of 
Holland. For a period covering a little more 
than the seventeenth century, Holland, like some 
of the Italian city-states at an earlier period, stood 
on the dangerous heights of greatness, beside 
nations so vastly her superior in territory and pop- 
ulation as to make it inevitable that sooner or 
later she must fall from the glorious and perilous 
eminence to which she had been raised by her own 
indomitable soul. Her fall came; it could not 



BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 69 

have been indefinitely postponed ; but it came far 
quicker than it needed to come, because of short- 
comings on her part to which both Great Britain 
and the United States would be wise to pay heed. 
Her government was singularly ineffective, the 
decentralization being such as often to permit 
the separatist, the particularist, spirit of the prov- 
inces to rob the central authority of all efficiency. 
This was bad enough. But the fatal weakness 
was that so common in rich, peace-loving societies, 
where men hate to think of war as possible, and 
try to justify their own reluctance to face it either 
by high-sounding moral platitudes, or else by 
a philosophy of short-sighted materialism. The 
Dutch were very wealthy. They grew to believe 
that they could hire others to do their fighting 
for them on land; and on sea, where they did 
their own fighting, and fought very well, they re- 
fused in time of peace to make ready fleets so 
efficient as either to insure them against the peace 
being broken or else to give them the victory 
when war came. To be opulent and unarmed is 
to secure ease in the present at the almost certain 
cost of disaster in the future. 

It is therefore easy to see why Holland lost 
when she did her position among the powers ; but 
it is far more difficult to explain why at the same 
time there should have come at least a partial loss 
of position in the world of art and letters. Some 



70 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 

spark of divine fire burnt itself out in the na- 
tional soul. As the line of great statesmen, of 
great warriors, by land and sea, came to an end, 
so the line of the great Dutch painters ended. 
The loss of pre-eminence in the schools followed 
the loss of pre-eminence in camp and in coimcil 
chamber. 

In the little republic of Holland, as in the great 
empire of Rome, it was not death which came, but 
transformation. Both Holland and Italy teach 
us that races that fall may rise again. In Hol- 
land, as in the Scandinavian kingdoms of Norway 
and Sweden, there was in a sense no decadence 
at all. There was nothing analogous to what has 
befallen so many countries: no lowering of the 
general standard of well-being, no general loss of 
vitality, no depopulation. What happened was, 
first a flowering time, in which the country's men 
of action and men of thought gave it a commanding 
position among the nations of the day; then this 
period of command passed, and the state revolved 
in an eddy, aside from the sweep of the mighty 
current of world life ; and yet the people themselves 
in their internal relations remained substantially 
unchanged, and in many fields of endeavor have 
now recovered themselves and play again a lead- 
ing part. 

In Italy, where history is recorded for a far 
longer time, the course of affairs was different. 



BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 71 

When the Roman Empire that was really Roman 
went down in ruin, there followed an interval of 
centuries when the gloom was almost unrelieved. 
Every form of luxury and frivolity, of contemptu- 
ous repugnance for serious work, of enervating 
self-indulgence, every form of vice and weakness 
which we regard as most ominous in the civiliza- 
tion of to-day, had been at work throughout Italy 
for generations. The nation had lost all patriot- 
ism. It had ceased to bring forth fighters or 
workers, had ceased to bring forth men of mark 
of any kind; and the remnant of the Italia.n peo- 
ple cowered in helpless misery among the horse- 
hoofs of the barbarians, as the wild northern bands 
rode in to take the land for a prey and the cities 
for a spoil. It was one of the great cataclysms of 
history ; but in the end it was seen that what came 
had been in part change and growth. It was not 
all mere destruction. Not only did Rome leave 
a vast heritage of language, culture, law, ideas, to 
all the modem world; but the people of Italy 
kept the old blood as the chief strain in their veins. 
In a few centuries came a wonderful new birth 
for Italy. Then for four or five hundred years 
there was a growth of many little city-states 
which, in their energy both in peace and war, in 
their fierce, fervent life, in the high quality of their 
men of arts and letters, and in their utter inabil- 
ity to combine so as to preserve order among them- 



72 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 

selves or to repel outside invasion, can not un- 
fairly be compared with classic Greece. Again 
Italy fell, and the land was ruled by Spaniard or 
Frenchman or Austrian; and again, in the nine- 
teenth century, there came for the third time a 
wonderful new birth. 

Contrast this persistence of the old type in its 
old home, and in certain lands which it had con- 
quered, with its utter disappearance in certain 
other lands where it was intrusive, but where it 
at one time seemed as firmly established as in 
Italy — certainly as in Spain or Gaul. No more 
curious example of the growth and disappearance 
of a national type can be found than in the case 
of the Graeco-Roman dominion in Western Asia 
and North Africa. All told it extended over 
nearly a thousand years, from the days of Alex- 
ander till after the time of Heraclius. Throughout 
these lands there yet remain the ruins of innumer- 
able cities which tell how firmly rooted that do- 
minion must once have been. The overshadow- 
ing and far-reaching importance of what occurred 
is sufficiently shown by the familiar fact that the 
New Testament was written in Greek; while to 
the early Christians, North Africa seemed as 
much a Latin land as Sicily or the valley of the 
Po. The intrusive peoples and their culture flour- 
ished in the lands for a period twice as long as 
that which has elapsed since, with the voyage of 



BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 73 

Columbus, modern history may fairly be said to 
have begun; and then they withered like dry 
grass before the flame of the Arab invasion, and 
their place knew them no more. They over- 
shadowed the ground; they vanished; and the 
old types reappeared in their old homes, with 
beside them a new type, the Arab. 

Now, as to all these changes we can at least 
be sure of the main facts. We know that the 
Hollander remains in Holland, though the great- 
ness of Holland has passed; we know that the 
Latin blood remains in Italy, whether to a greater 
or less extent; and that the Latin culture has 
died out in the African realm it once won, while 
it has lasted in Spain and France, and thence has 
extended itself to continents beyond the ocean. 
We may not know the causes of the facts, save 
partially; but the facts themselves we do know. 
But there are other cases in which we are at pres- 
ent ignorant even of the facts; we do not know 
what the changes really were, still less the hidden 
causes and meaning of these changes. Much re- 
mains to be found out before we can speak with 
any certainty as to whether some changes mean 
the actual dying out or the mere transformation 
of types. It is, for instance, astonishing how 
little permanent change in the physical make-up 
of the people seems to have been worked in Eu- 
rope by the migrations of the races in historic 



74 



BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 



times. A tall, fair-haired, long-skulled race pene- 
trates to some southern country and establishes 
a commonwealth. The generations pass. There 
is no violent revolution, no break in continuity of 
history, nothing in the written records to indicate 
an epoch-making change at any given moment; 
and yet after a time we find that the old type has 
reappeared and that the people of the locality do 
not substantially differ in physical form from the 
people of other localities that did not suffer such 
an invasion. Does this mean that gradually the 
children of the invaders have dwindled and died 
out; or, as the blood is mixed with the ancient 
blood, has there been a change, part reversion and 
part assimilation, to the ancient type in its old 
surroundings? Do tint of skin, eyes and hair, 
shape of skull, and stature change in the new 
environment, so as to be like those of the older 
people who dwelt in this environment? Do the 
intrusive races, without change of blood, tend 
iinder the pressure of their new surroundings to 
change in type so as to resemble the ancient peo- 
ples of the land? Or, as the strains mingled, 
has the new strain dwindled and vanished, from 
causes as yet obscure? Has the blood of the 
Lombard practically disappeared from Italy, and 
of the Visigoth from Spain, or does it still flow 
in large populations where the old physical type 
has once more become dominant? Here in Eng- 



BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 75 

land, the long-skulled men of the long barrows, 
the short-skulled men of the round barrows — have 
they blended, or has one or the other type actu- 
ally died out; or are they merged in some older 
race which they seemingly supplanted, or have 
they adopted the tongue and civilization of some 
later race which seemingly destroyed them? We 
can not say. We do not know which of the wide- 
ly different stocks now speaking Aryan tongues 
represents in physical characteristics the ancient 
Aryan type, nor where the type originated, nor 
how or why it imposed its language on other types, 
nor how much or how little mixture of blood ac- 
companied the change of tongue. 

The phenomena of national growth and decay, 
both of those which can and those which can not 
be explained, have been peculiarly in evidence 
during the four centuries that have gone by since 
the discovery of America and the rounding of the 
Cape of Good Hope. These have been the four 
centuries of by far the most intense and constantly 
accelerating rapidity of movement and develop- 
ment that the world has yet seen. The move- 
ment has covered all the fields of human activity. 
It has witnessed an altogether imexampled spread 
of civilized mankind over the world, as well as 
an altogether unexampled advance in man's do- 
minion over nature; and this together with a 
literary and artistic activity to be matched in 



76 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 

but one previous epoch. This period of extension 
and development has been that of one race, the 
so-called white race, or, to speak more accurately, 
the group of peoples living in Europe, who un- 
doubtedly have a certain kinship of blood, who 
profess the Christian religion, and trace back 
their culture to Greece and Rome. 

The memories of men are short, and it is easy 
to forget how brief is this period of unquestioned 
supremacy of the so-called white race. It is but 
a thing of yesterday. During the thousand years 
which went before the opening of this era of Eu- 
ropean supremacy, the attitude of Asia and Africa, 
of Hun and Mongol, Turk and Tartar, Arab and 
Moor, had on the whole been that of successful 
aggression against Europe. More than a century 
went by after the voyages of Columbus before 
the mastery in war began to pass from the Asiatic 
to the European. During that time Europe pro- 
duced no generals or conquerors able to stand 
comparison with Selim and Solyman, Baber and 
Akbar. Then the European advance gathered 
momentum; until at the present time peoples of 
European blood hold dominion over all America 
and Australia and the islands of the sea, over most 
of Africa, and the major half of Asia. Much of 
this world conquest is merely political, and such 
a conquest is always likely in the long run to 
vanish. But very much of it represents not a 



BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES ^^ 

merely political, but an ethnic conquest; the in- 
trusive people having either exterminated or 
driven out the conquered peoples, or else having 
imposed upon them its tongue, law, culture, and 
religion, together with a strain of its blood. Dur- 
ing this period substantially all of the world 
achievements worth remembering are to be cred- 
ited to the people of European descent. The 
first exception of any consequence is the wonder- 
ful rise of Japan within the last generation — a 
phenomenon unexampled in history; for both in 
blood and in culture the Japanese line of ances- 
tral descent is as remote as possible from ours; 
and yet Japan, while hitherto keeping most of 
what was strongest in her ancient character and 
traditions, has assimilated with curious complete- 
ness most of the characteristics that have given 
power and leadership to the West. 

During this period of intense and feverish activ- 
ity among the peoples of European stock, first 
one and then another has taken the lead. The 
movement began with Spain and Portugal. Their 
flowering-time was as brief as it was wonderful. 
The gorgeous pages of their annals are illumined 
by the figures of warriors, explorers, statesmen, 
poets, and painters. Then their days of great- 
ness ceased. Many partial explanations can be 
given, but something remains behind, some hidden 
force for evil, some hidden source of weakness 



78 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 

upon which we can not lay our hands. Yet there 
are many signs that in the New World, after cen- 
turies of arrested growth, the peoples of Spanish 
and Portuguese stock are entering upon another 
era of development, and there are other signs that 
this is true also in the Iberian peninsula itself. 

About the time that the first brilliant period 
of the leadership of the Iberian peoples was draw- 
ing to a close, at the other end of Europe, in the 
land of melancholy steppe and melancholy forest, 
the Slav turned in his troubled sleep and stretched 
out his hand to grasp leadership and dominion. 
Since then almost every nation of Europe has at 
one time or another sought a place in the move- 
ment of expansion; but for the last three centu- 
ries the great phenomenon of mankind has been 
the growth of the English-speaking peoples and 
their spread over the world's waste spaces. 

Comparison is often made between the empire 
of Britain and the empire of Rome. When 
judged relatively to the effect on all modem civili- 
-zation, the empire of Rome is of course the more 
important, simply because all the nations of Eu- 
rope and their offshoots in other continents trace 
back their culture either to the earlier Rome by 
the Tiber, or the later Rome by the Bosphorus. 
The empire of Rome is the most stupendous fact 
in lay history; no empire later in time can be 
compared with it. But this is merely another 



BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 79 

way of saying that the nearer the source the more 
important becomes any deflection of the stream's 
current. Absolutely, comparing the two empires 
one with the other in point of actual achievement, 
and disregarding the immensely increased effect 
on other civilizations which inhered in the older 
empire because it antedated the younger by a 
couple of thousand years, there is little to choose 
between them as regards the wide and abounding 
interest and importance of their careers. 

In the world of antiquity each great empire 
rose when its predecessor had already crumbled. 
By the time that Rome loomed large over the 
horizon of history, there were left for her to con- 
tend with only decaying civilizations and raw 
barbarism. When she conquered Pyrrhus, she 
strove against the strength of but one of the many 
fragments into which Alexander's kingdom had 
fallen. When she conquered Carthage, she over- 
threw a foe against whom for two centuries the 
single Greek city of Syracuse had contended on 
equal terms; it was not the Sepoy armies of the 
Carthaginian plutocracy, but the towering genius 
of the House of Barca, which rendered the strug- 
gle forever memorable. It was the distance and 
the desert, rather than the Parthian horse-bow- 
men, that set bounds to Rome in the east; and 
on the north her advance was curbed by the vast 
reaches of marshy woodland, rather than by the 



8o BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 

tall barbarians who dwelt therein. During the 
long generations of her greatness, and until the 
sword dropped from her withered hand, the Par- 
thian was never a menace of aggression, and the 
German threatened her but to die. 

On the contrary, the great expansion of Eng- 
land has occurred, the great empire of Britain 
has been achieved, during the centuries that have 
also seen mighty military nations rise and flourish 
on the continent of Europe. It is as if Rome, 
while creating and keeping the empire she won be- 
tween the days of Scipio and the days of Trajan, 
had at the same time held her own with the Nine- 
veh of Sargon and Tiglath, the Egypt of Thothmes 
and Rameses, and the kingdoms of Persia and 
Macedon in the red flush of their warrior-dawn. 
The empire of Britain is vaster in space, in popu- 
lation, in wealth, in wide variety of possession, in 
a history of multiplied and manifold achievement 
of every kind, than even the glorious empire of 
Rome. Yet, imlike Rome, Britain has won do- 
minion in every clime, has carried her flag by con- 
quest and settlement to the uttermost ends of 
the earth, at the very time that haughty and 
powerful rivals, in their abounding youth or 
strong maturity, were eager to set bounds to her 
greatness, and to tear from her what she had won 
afar. England has peopled continents with her 
children, has swayed the destinies of teeming 



BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 8i 

myriads of alien race, has ruled ancient mon- 
archies, and wrested from all comers the right to 
the world's waste spaces, while at home she has 
held her own before nations, each of military 
power comparable to Rome's at her zenith. 

Rome fell by attack from without only because 
the ills within her own borders had grown in- 
curable. What is true of your country, my 
hearers, is true of my own; while we should be 
vigilant against foes from without, yet 'we need 
never really fear them so long as we safeguard 
ourselves against the enemies within our own 
households; and these enemies are our own pas- 
sions and follies. Free peoples can escape being 
mastered by others only by being able to master 
themselves. We Americans and you people of 
the British Isles alike need ever to keep in mind 
that, among the many qualities indispensable to 
the success of a great democracy, and second only 
to a high and stem sense of duty, of moral ob- 
ligation, are self-knowledge and self-mastery. 
You, my hosts, and I may not agree in all our 
views; some of you would think me a very 
radical democrat — as, for the matter of that, I 
am — and my theory of imperialism would prob- 
ably stiit the anti-imperialists as little as it would 
stdt a certain type of forcible-feeble imperialist. 
But there are some points on which we must all 
agree if we think soundly. The precise form of 



82 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 

government, democratic or otherwise, is the in- 
strument, the tool, with which we work. It is 
important to have a good tool. But, even if it 
is the best possible, it is only a tool. No imple- 
ment can ever take the place of the guiding in- 
telligence that wields it. A very bad tool will 
ruin the work of the best craftsman; but a good 
tool in bad hands is no better. In the last analysis 
the all-important factor in national greatness is 
national character. 

There are questions which we of the great 
civilized nations are ever tempted to ask of the 
future. Is our time of growth drawing to an 
end? Are we as nations soon to come under the 
rule of that great law of death which is itself 
but part of the great law of life? None can tell. 
Forces that we can see, and other forces that are 
hidden or that can but dimly be apprehended, are 
at work all around us, both for good and for evil. 
The growth in luxury, in love of ease, in taste for 
vapid and frivolous excitement, is both evident 
and unhealthy. The most ominous sign is the dim- 
inution in the birth-rate, in the rate of natural 
increase, now to a larger or lesser degree shared 
by most of the civilized nations of central and 
western Europe, of America and Australia — a 
diminution so great that, if it continues for the 
next century at the rate which has obtained for 
the last twenty -five years, all the more highly 



BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 83 

civilized peoples will be stationary or else have be- 
gun to go backward in population, while many of 
them will have already gone very far backward. 

There is much that should give us concern for 
the future. But there is much also which should 
give us hope. No man is more apt to be mista- 
ken than the prophet of evil. After the French 
Revolution in 1830 Niebuhr hazarded the guess 
that all civiHzation was about to go down with a 
crash, that we were all about to share the fall of 
third- and fourth-century Rome — a respectable, 
but painfully overworked, comparison. The fears 
once expressed by the followers of Malthus as to 
the future of the world have proved groundless 
as regards the civilized portion of the world; it 
is strange indeed to look back at Carlyle's proph- 
ecies of some seventy years ago, and then think 
of the teeming life of achievement, the life of 
conquest of every kind, and of noble effort crowned 
by success, which has been ours for the two gen- 
erations since he complained to High Heaven that 
all the tales had been told and all the songs sung, 
and that all the deeds really worth doing had been 
done. I believe with all my heart that a great 
future remains for us ; but whether it does or does 
not, our duty is not altered. However the battle 
may go, the soldier worthy of the name will with 
utmost vigor do his allotted task, and bear him- 
self as valiantly in defeat as in victory. Come 



84 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 

what will, we belong to peoples who have not 
yielded to the craven fear of being great. In the 
ages that have gone by, the great nations, the 
nations that have expanded and that have played 
a mighty part in the world, have in the end 
grown old and weakened and vanished; but so 
have the nations whose only thought was to avoid 
all danger, all effort, who would risk nothing, and 
who therefore gained nothing. In the end, the 
same fate may overwhelm all alike; but the 
memory of the one type perishes with it, while 
the other leaves its mark deep on the history of 
all the future of mankind. 

A nation that seemingly dies may be bom 
again; and even though in the physical sense it 
die utterly, it may yet hand down a history of 
heroic achievement, and for all time to come may 
profoundly influence the nations that arise in its 
place by the impress of what it has done. Best 
of all is it to do our part well, and at the same 
time to see our blood live young and vital in men 
and women fit to take up the task as we lay it 
down; for so shall our seed inherit the earth. 
But if this, which is best, is denied us, then at 
least it is ours to remember that if we choose we 
can be torch-bearers, as our fathers were before 
us. The torch has been handed on from nation 
to nation, from civilization to civilization, through- 
out all recorded time, from the dim years before 



BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 85 

history dawned down to the blazing splendor of 
this teeming century of ours. It dropped from 
the hands of the coward and the sluggard, of the 
man wrapped in luxury or love of ease, the man 
whose soul was eaten away by self-indulgence; it 
has been kept alight only by those who were 
mighty of heart and cunning of hand. What they 
worked at, provided it was worth doing at all, 
was of less matter than how they worked, whether 
in the realm of the mind or the realm of the body. 
If their work was good, if what they achieved 
was of substance, then high success was really 
theirs. 

In the first part of this lecture I drew certain 
analogies between what has occurred to forms of 
animal life through the procession of the ages on 
this planet, and what has occurred and is occur- 
ring to the great artificial civilizations which have 
gradually spread over the world's surface during 
the thousands of years that have elapsed since 
cities of temples and palaces first rose beside the 
Nile and the Euphrates, and the harbors of Mi- 
noan Crete bristled with the masts of the Mgean 
craft. But of course the parallel is true only in 
the roughest and most general way. Moreover, 
even between the civilizations of to-day and the 
civilizations of ancient times there are differ- 
ences so profound that we must be cautious in 
drawing any conclusions for the present based on 



86 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 

what has happened in the past. While freely 
admitting all of our follies and weaknesses of to- 
day, it is yet mere perversity to refuse to realize 
the incredible advance that has been made in 
ethical standards. I do not believe that there is 
the slightest necessary connection between any 
weakening of virile force and this advance in the 
moral standard, this gro^i:h of the sense of ob- 
ligation to one's neighbor and of reluctance to 
do that neighbor wrong. We need have scant pa- 
tience with that silly cynicism which insists that 
kindliness of character only accompanies weak- 
ness of character. On the contrary, just as in 
private life many of the men of strongest char- 
acter are the very men of loftiest and most ex- 
alted morality, so I believe that in national life, 
as the ages go by, we shall find that the permanent 
national types will more and more tend to become 
those in which, though intellect stands high, char- 
acter stands higher; in which rugged strength 
and courage, rugged capacity to resist wrongful 
aggression by others, will go hand in hand with a 
lofty scorn of doing WTong to others. This is the 
type of Timoleon, of Hampden, of Washington, 
and Lincoln. These were as good men, as dis- 
interested and imselfish men, as ever served a 
state; and they were also as strong men as ever 
founded or saved a state. Surely such examples 
prove that there is nothing Utopian in our effort 



BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 87 

to combine justice and strength in the same na- 
tion. The really high civilizations must them- 
selves supply the antidote to the self-indulgence 
and love of ease which they tend to produce. 

Every modem civilized nation has many and 
terrible problems to solve within its own borders, 
problems that arise not merely from juxta- 
position of poverty and riches, but especially 
from the self-consciousness of both poverty and 
riches. Each nation must deal with these matters 
in its own fashion, and yet the spirit in which 
the problem is approached must ever be fimda- 
mentally the same. It must be a spirit of broad 
humanity, of brotherly kindness, of acceptance 
of responsibility, one for each and each for all, 
and at the same time a spirit as remote as the 
poles from every form of weakness and senti- 
mentality. As in war to pardon the coward is 
to do cruel wrong to the brave man whose life 
his cowardice jeopardizes, so in civil affairs it is 
revolting to every principle of justice to give to 
the lazy, the vicious, or even the feeble or dull- 
witted a reward which is really the robbery of 
what braver, wiser, abler men have earned. The 
only effective way to help any man is to help him 
to help himself ; and the worst lesson to teach him 
is that he can be permanently helped at the ex- 
pense of some one else. True liberty shows itself 
to best advantage in protecting the rights of 



88 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 

others, and especially of minorities. Privilege 
should not be tolerated because it is to the ad- 
vantage of a minority; nor yet because it is to 
the advantage of a majority. No doctrinaire 
theories of vested rights or freedom of contract 
can stand in the way of our cutting out abuses 
from the body politic. Just as little can we afford 
to follow the doctrinaires of an impossible — and 
incidentally of a highly undesirable — social rev- 
olution which, in destroying individual rights — 
including property rights — and the family, would 
destroy the two chief agents in the advance of 
mankind, and the two chief reasons why either 
the advance or the preservation of mankind is 
worth while. It is an evil and a dreadful thing 
to be callous to sorrow and suffering and blind to 
our duty to do all things possible for the better- 
ment of social conditions. But it is an unspeak- 
ably foolish thing to strive for this betterment by 
means so destructive that they would leave no 
social conditions to better. In dealing with all 
these social problems, with the intimate relations 
of the family, with wealth in private use and 
business use, with labor, with poverty, the one 
prime necessity is to remember that, though hard- 
ness of heart is a great evil, it is no greater an evil 
than softness of head. 

But in addition to these problems, the most 
intimate and important of all, and which to a 



BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 89 

larger or less degree affect all the modern nations 
somewhat alike, we of the great nations that have 
expanded, that are now in complicated relations 
with one another and with alien races, have 
special problems and special duties of our own. 
You belong to a nation which possesses the great- 
est empire upon which the sun has ever shone. I 
belong to a nation which is trying, on a scale 
hitherto unexampled, to work out the problems 
of government for, of, and by the people, while at 
the same time doing the international duty of a 
great Power. But there are certain problems 
which both of us have to solve, and as to which 
our standards should be the same. The English- 
man, the man of the British Isles, in his various 
homes across the seas, and the American, both at 
home and abroad, are brought into contact with 
utterly alien peoples, some with a civilization 
more ancient than our own, others still in, or 
having but recently arisen from, the barbarism 
which our people left behind ages ago. The prob- 
lems that arise are of well-nigh inconceivable 
difficulty. They can not be solved by the foolish 
sentimentality of stay-at-home people, with little 
patent recipes and those cut-and-dried theories 
of the political nursery which have such limited 
applicability amid the crash of elemental forces. 
Neither can they be solved by the raw brutality 
of the men who, whether at home or on the rough 



90 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 

frontier of civilization, adopt might as the only 
standard of right in dealing with other men, and 
treat alien races only as subjects for exploitation. 
No hard-and-fast rule can be drawn as apply- 
ing to all alien races, because they differ from one 
another far more widely than some of them differ 
from us. But there are one or two rules which 
must not be forgotten. In the long rtm there 
can be no justification for one race managing or 
controlling another unless the management and 
control are exercised in the interest and for the 
benefit of that other race. This is what our peo- 
ples have in the main done, and must continue in 
the future in even greater degree to do, in India, 
Egypt, and the Philippines alike. In the next 
place, as regards every race, everywhere, at home 
or abroad, we can not afford to deviate from the 
great rule of righteousness which bids us treat 
each man on his worth as a man. He must not 
be sentimentally favored because he belongs to a 
given race; he must not be given immunity in 
wrong-doing or permitted to cumber the ground, 
or given other privileges which would be denied 
to the vicious and unfit among ourselves. On the 
other hand, where he acts in a way which would 
entitle him to respect and reward if he was one of 
our own stock, he is just as entitled to that re- 
spect and reward if he comes of another stock, 
even though that other stock produces a much 



BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 91 

smaller proportion of men of his type than does 
our own. This has nothing to do with social 
intermingling, with what is called social equality. 
It has to do merely with the question of doing to 
each man and each woman that elementary jus- 
tice which will permit him or her to gain from 
life the reward which should always accompany 
thrift, sobriety, self-control, respect for the rights 
of others, and hard and intelligent work to a 
given end. To more than such just treatment no 
man is entitled, and less than such just treat- 
ment no man should receive. 

The other type of duty is the international 
duty, the duty owed by one nation to another. 
I hold that the laws of morality which should 
govern individuals in their dealings one with the 
other, are just as binding concerning nations in 
their dealings one with the other. The applica- 
tion of the moral law must be different in the two 
cases, because in one case it has, and in the other 
it has not, the sanction of a civil law with force 
behind it. The individual can depend for his 
rights upon the courts, which themselves derive 
their force from the police power of the state. 
The nation can depend upon nothing of the kind; 
and therefore, as things are now, it is the highest 
duty of the most advanced and freest peoples 
to keep themselves in such a state of readiness 
as to forbid to any barbarism or despotism the 



92 BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 

hope of arresting the progress of the world by 
striking down the nations that lead in that prog- 
ress. It would be foolish indeed to pay heed 
to the unwise persons who desire disarmament to 
be begun by the very peoples who, of all others, 
should not be left helpless before any possible foe. 
But we must reprobate quite as strongly both the 
leaders and the peoples who practise, or encour- 
age, or condone, aggression and iniquity by the 
strong at the expense of the weak. We should 
tolerate lawlessness and wickedness neither by the 
weak nor by the strong ; and both weak and strong 
we should in return treat with scrupulous fair- 
ness. The foreign policy of a great and self- 
respecting country should be conducted on ex- 
actly the same plane of honor, for insistence upon 
one's own rights and of respect for the rights of 
others, that marks the conduct of a brave and 
honorable man when dealing with his fellows. 
Permit me to support this statement out of my 
own experience. For nearly eight years I was 
the head of a great nation, and charged especially 
with the conduct of its foreign policy; and dur- 
ing those years I took no action with reference 
to any other people on the face of the earth that 
I would not have felt justified in taking as an in- 
dividual in dealing with other individuals. 

I believe that we of the great civilized nations 
of to-day have a right to feel that long careers of 



BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES 93 

achievement lie before our several countries. To 
each of us is vouchsafed the honorable privilege 
of doing his part, however small, in that work. 
Let us strive hardily for success, even if by so doing 
we risk failure, spuming the poorer souls of small 
endeavor, who know neither failure nor success. 
Let us hope that our own blood shall continue 
in the land, that our children and children's chil- 
dren to endless generations shall arise to take our 
places and play a mighty and dominant part in 
the world. But whether this be denied or granted 
by the years we shall not see, let at least the satis- 
faction be ours that we have carried onward the 
lighted torch in our own day and generation. If 
we do this, then, as our eyes close, and we go 
out into the darkness, and others' hands grasp the 
torch, at least we can say that our part has been 
borne well and valiantly. 



THE WORLD MOVEMENT 



THE WORLD MOVEMENT ^ 

I VERY highly appreciate the chance to ad- 
dress the University of Berlin in the year 
that closes its first centenary of existence. 
It is difficult for you in the Old World fully to ap- 
preciate the feelings of a man who comes from a 
nation still in the making to a country with an 
immemorial historic past; and especially is this 
the case when that country, with its ancient past 
behind it, yet looks with proud confidence into 
the future, and in the present shows all the abound- 
ing vigor of lusty youth. Such is the case with 
Germany. More than a thousand years have 
passed since the Roman Empire of the West be- 
came in fact a German empire. Throughout 
mediaeval times the Empire and the Papacy were 
the two central features in the history of the Oc- 
cident. With the Ottos and the Henrys began the 
slow rise of that Western life which has shaped 
modem Europe, and therefore ultimately the 
whole modern world. Their task was to organize 
society and to keep it from crumbling to pieces. 
They were castle-builders, city-founders, road- 

^ Delivered at the University of Berlin, May 12, 1910. 

97 



98 THE WORLD MOVEMENT 

makers; they battled to bring order out of the 
seething turbulence around them; and at the 
same time they first beat back heathendom and 
then slowly wrested from it its possessions. 

After the downfall of Rome and the breaking 
in sunder of the Roman Empire, the first real 
crystallization of the forces that were working 
for a new uplift of civilization in western Europe 
was round the Karling house, and, above all, 
roimd the great Emperor, Karl the Great, the seat 
of whose empire was at Aachen. Under the 
Karlings the Arab and the Moor were driven back 
beyond the Pyrenees; the last of the old heathen 
Germans were forced into Christianity, and the 
Avars, wild horsemen from the Asian steppes, 
who had long held tented dominion in middle 
Europe, were utterly destroyed. With the break- 
up of the Karling empire came chaos once more, 
and a fresh inrush of savagery: Vikings from the 
frozen north, and new hordes of outlandish riders 
from Asia. It was the early emperors of Germany 
proper who quelled these barbarians; in their 
time Dane and Norseman and Magyar became 
Christians, and most of the Slav peoples as well, 
so that Europe began to take on a shape which 
we can recognize to-day. Since then the cen- 
turies have rolled by, with strange alternations of 
fortune, now well-nigh barren, and again great 
with German achievement in arms and in gov- 



THE WORLD MOVEMENT 99 

ernment, in science and the arts. The centre 
of power shifted hither and thither within Ger- 
man lands; the great house of Hohenzollem rose, 
the house which has at last seen Germany spring 
into a commanding position in the very forefront 
among the nations of mankind. 

To this ancient land, with its glorious past and 
splendid present, to this land of many memories 
and of eager hopes, I come from a young nation, 
which is by blood akin to, and yet different from, 
each of the great nations of middle and western 
Europe; which has inherited or acquired much 
from each, but is changing and developing every 
inheritance and acquisition into something new 
and strange. The German strain in our blood is 
large, for almost from the beginning there has 
been a large German element among the succes- 
sive waves of newcomers whose children's chil- 
dren have been and are being fused into the Amer- 
ican nation; and I myself trace my origin to 
that branch of the Low Dutch stock which raised 
Holland out of the North Sea. Moreover, we 
have taken from you, not only much of the blood 
that runs through our veins, but much of the 
thought that shapes our minds. For generations 
American scholars have flocked to your univer- 
sities, and, thanks to the wise foresight of his 
Imperial Majesty the present Emperor, the in- 
timate and friendly connection between the two 



lOO THE WORLD MOVEMENT 

countries is now in every way closer than it has 
ever been before. 

Germany is pre-eminently a country in which 
the world movement of to-day in all of its mul- 
titudinous aspects is plainly visible. The life of 
this university covers the period during which 
that movement has spread until it is felt through- 
out every continent, while its velocity has been 
constantly accelerating, so that the face of the 
world has changed, and is now changing, as never 
before. It is therefore fit and appropriate here 
to speak on this subject. 

When, in the slow procession of the ages, man 
was developed on this planet, the change worked 
by his appearance was at first slight. Further 
ages passed while he groped and struggled by 
infinitesimal degrees upward through the lower 
grades of savagery; for the general law is that 
life which is advanced and complex, whatever its 
nature, changes more quickly than simpler and 
less advanced forms. The life of savages changes 
and advances with extreme slowness, and groups 
of savages influence one another but little. The 
first rudimentary beginnings of that complex life 
of communities which we call civilization marked 
a period when man had already long been by far 
the most important creature on the planet. The 
history of the living world had become, in fact, 
the history of man, and therefore something 



THE WORLD MOVEMENT loi 

totally different in kind as well as in degree from 
what it had been before. There are interesting 
analogies between what has gone on in the develop- 
ment of life generally and what has gone on in the 
development of human society. [These I have dis- 
cussed in the preceding chapter.] But the differ- 
ences are profound, and go to the root of things. 

Throughout their early stages the movements 
of civilization — for, properly speaking, there was 
no one movement — were very slow, were local 
in space, and were partial in the sense that each 
developed along but few lines. Of the numberless 
years that covered these early stages we have no 
record. They were the years that saw such ex- 
traordinary discoveries and inventions as fire, 
and the wheel, and the bow, and the domestica- 
tion of animals. So local were these inventions 
that at the present day there yet linger savage 
tribes, still fixed in the half -bestial life of an in- 
finitely remote past, who know none of them 
except fire — and the discovery and use of fire may 
have marked, not the beginning of civilization, but 
the beginning of the savagery which separated 
man from brute. 

Even after civilization and culture had achieved 
a relatively high position, they were still purely 
local, and from this fact subject to violent shocks. 
Modem research has shown the existence in pre- 
historic or, at least, protohistoric times of many 



I02 THE WORLD MOVEMENT 

peoples who, in given localities, achieved a high 
and peculiar culture, a culture that was later so 
completely destroyed that it is difficult to say 
what, if any, traces it left on the subsequent cul- 
tures out of which we have developed our own, 
while it is also difficult to say exactly how much 
any one of these cultures influenced any other. 
In many cases, as where invaders with weapons 
of bronze or iron conquered the neolithic peoples, 
the higher civilization completely destroyed the 
lower civilization, or barbarism, with which it 
came in contact. In other cases, while superior- 
ity in culture gave its possessors at the beginning 
a marked military and governmental superiority 
over the neighboring peoples, yet sooner or later 
there accompanied it a certain softness or ener- 
vating quality which left the cultured folk at the 
mercy of the stark and greedy neighboring tribes, 
in whose savage souls cupidity gradually over- 
came terror and awe. Then the people that had 
been struggling upward would be engulfed, and 
the levelling waves of barbarism wash over them. 
But we are not yet in position to speak definitely 
on these matters. It is only the researches of 
recent years that have enabled us so much as to 
guess at the course of events in prehistoric Greece ; 
while as yet we can hardly even hazard a guess 
as to how, for instance, the Hallstadt culture rose 
and fell, or as to the history and fate of the build- 



THE WORLD MOVEMENT 103 

ers of those strange ruins of which Stonehenge is 
the type. 

The first civiHzations which left behind them 
clear records rose in that hoary historic past which 
geologically is part of the immediate present — and 
which is but a span's length from the present, even 
when compared only with the length of time that 
man has lived on this planet. These first civili- 
zations were those which rose in Mesopotamia 
and the Nile valley some six or eight thousand 
years ago. As far as we can see, they were well- 
nigh independent centres of cultural development, 
and our knowledge is not such at present as to 
enable us to connect either with the early cultural 
movements, in southwestern Europe on the one 
hand, or in India on the other, or with that 
Chinese civilization which has been so profoimdly 
affected by Indian influences. 

Compared with the civilizations with which 
we are best acquainted, the striking features in 
the Mesopotamian and Nilotic civilizations were 
the length of time they endured and their com- 
parative changelessness. The kings, priests, and 
peoples who dwelt by the Nile or Euphrates are 
found thinking much the same thoughts, doing 
much the same deeds, leaving at least very similar 
records, while time passes in tens of centuries. 
Of course there was change; of course there were 
action and reaction in influence between them 



I04 THE WORLD MOVEMENT 

and their neighbors ; and the movement of change, 
of development, material, mental, spiritual, was 
much faster than anything that had occurred 
during the eons of mere savagery. But in con- 
tradistinction to modem times the movement was 
very slow indeed; and, moreover, in each case it 
was strongly localized, while the field of endeavor 
was narrow. There were certain conquests by 
man over nature; there were certain conquests 
in the domain of pure intellect ; there were certain 
extensions which spread the area of civilized man- 
kind. But it would be hard to speak of it as a 
*' world movement" at all, for by far the greater 
part of the habitable globe was not only unknown, 
but its existence unguessed at, so far as peoples 
with any civilization whatsoever were concerned. 

With the downfall of these ancient civiliza- 
tions there sprang into prominence those peoples 
with whom our own cultural history may be said 
to begin. Those ideas and influences in our lives 
which we can consciously trace back at all are in 
the great majority of instances to be traced to 
the Jew, the Greek, or the Roman; and the or- 
dinary man, when he speaks of the nations of 
antiquity, has in mind specifically these three 
peoples — although, judged even by the history of 
which we have record, theirs is a very modem an- 
tiquity indeed. 

The case of the Jew was quite exceptional. 



THE WORLD MOVEMENT 105 

His was a small nation, of little more consequence 
than the sister nations of Moab and Damascus, 
until all three, and the other petty states of the 
country, fell under the yoke of the alien. Then 
he survived, while all his fellows died. In the 
spiritual domain he contributed a religion which 
has been the most potent of all factors in its effect 
on the subsequent history of mankind; but none 
of his other contributions compare with the leg- 
acies left us by the Greek and the Roman. 

The Greco-Roman world saw a civilization far 
more brilliant, far more varied and intense, than 
any that had gone before it, and one that afEected 
a far larger share of the world's surface. For the 
first time there began to be something which at 
least foreshadowed a ''world movement" in the 
sense that it affected a considerable portion of the 
world's surface and that it represented what, was 
incomparably the most important of all that was 
happening in world history at the time. In 
breadth and depth the field of intellectual in- 
terest had greatly broadened at the same time 
that the physical area affected by the civilization 
had similarly extended. Instead of a civilization 
affecting only one river valley or one nook of the 
Mediterranean, there was a civilization which di- 
rectly or indirectly influenced mankind from the 
Desert of Sahara to the Baltic, from the Atlantic 
Ocean to the westernmost mountain chains that 



io6 THE WORLD MOVEMENT 

spring from the Himalayas. Throughout most of 
this region there began to work certain influences 
which, though with widely varying intensity, did 
nevertheless tend to affect a large portion of man- 
kind. In many of the forms of science, in almost 
all the forms of art, there was great activity. In 
addition to great soldiers there were great ad- 
ministrators and statesmen whose concern was 
with the fimdamental questions of social and 
civil life. Nothing like the width and variety of 
intellectual achievement and imderstanding had 
ever before been known; and for the first time 
we come across great intellectual leaders, great 
philosophers and writers, whose works are a part 
of all that is highest in modem thought, whose 
writings are as alive to-day as when they were 
first issued; and there were others of even more 
daring and original temper, a philosopher like 
Democritus, a poet like Lucretius, whose minds 
leaped ahead through the centuries and saw what 
none of their contemporaries sav/, but who were 
so hampered by their surroundings that it was 
physically impossible for them to leave to the 
later world much concrete addition to knowledge. 
The civilization was one of comparatively rapid 
change, viewed by the standard of Babylon and 
Memphis. There was incessant movement; and, 
moreover, the whole system went down with a 
crash to seeming destruction after a period short 



THE WORLD MOVEMENT 107 

compared with that covered by the reigns of a 
score of Egyptian dynasties, or with the time that 
elapsed between a Babylonian defeat by Elam 
and a war sixteen centuries later which fully 
avenged it. 

This civilization flourished with brilliant splen- 
dor. Then it fell. In its northern seats it was 
overwhelmed by a wave of barbarism from among 
those half -savage peoples from whom you and I, 
my hearers, trace our descent. In the south and 
east it was destroyed later, but far more thor- 
oughly, by invaders of an utterly different type. 
Both conquests were of great importance; but 
it was the northern conquest which in its ulti- 
mate effects was of by far the greatest importance. 

With the advent of the Dark Ages the move- 
ment of course ceased, and it did not begin anew 
for many centuries ; while a thousand years passed 
before it was once more in full swing, so far as 
European civilization, so far as the world civili- 
zation of to-day, is concerned. During all those 
centuries the civilized world, in our acceptation 
of the term, was occupied, as its chief task, in 
slowly climbing back to the position from which 
it had fallen after the age of the Antonines. Of 
course a general statement like this must be ac- 
cepted with qualifications. There is no hard-and- 
fast line between one age or period and another, 
and in no age is either progress or retrogression 



io8 THE WORLD MOVEMENT 

universal in all things. There were many points 
in which the Middle Ages, because of the simple 
fact that they were Christian, surpassed the bril- 
liant pagan civilization of the past; and there 
are some points in which the civilization that suc- 
ceeded them has sunk below the level of the ages 
which saw such mighty masterpieces of poetry, of 
architecture — especially cathedral architecture — 
and of serene spiritual and forceful lay leadership. 
But they were centuries of violence, rapine, and 
cruel injustice; and truth was so little heeded 
that the noble and daring spirits who sought it, 
especially in its scientific form, did so in deadly 
peril of the fagot and the halter. 

During this period there were several very im- 
portant extra-European movements, one or two 
of which deeply affected Europe. Islam arose, 
and conquered far and wide, uniting fundamentally 
different races into a brotherhood of feeling which 
Christianity has never been able to rival, and at 
the time of the Crusades profoundly influencing 
European culture. It produced a civilization of 
its own, brilliant and here and there useful, but 
hopelessly limited when compared with the civili- 
zation of which we ourselves are the heirs. The 
great cultured peoples of southeastern and eastern 
Asia continued their checkered development to- 
tally unaffected by, and without knowledge of, 
any European influence. 



THE WORLD MOVEMENT 109 

Throughout the whole period there came 
against Europe, out of the unknown wastes of 
central Asia, an endless succession of strange and 
terrible conqueror races whose mission was mere 
destruction — Hun and Avar, Mongol, Tartar, and 
Turk. These fierce and squalid tribes of warrior 
horsemen flailed mankind with red scourges, 
wasted and destroyed, and then vanished from 
the ground they had overrun. But in no way 
worth noting did they coimt in the advance of 
mankind. 

At last, a little over four hundred years ago, 
the movement toward a world civilization took 
up its interrupted march. The beginning of the 
modem movement may roughly be taken as syn- 
chronizing with the discovery of printing, and 
with that series of bold sea ventures which cul- 
minated in the discovery of America; and, after 
these two epochal feats had begun to produce 
their full effects in material and intellectual life, 
it became inevitable that civilization should 
thereafter differ not only in degree but even in 
kind from all that had gone before. Immediately 
after the voyages of Coltmibus and Vasco da 
Gama there began a tremendous religious ferment ; 
the awakening of intellect went hand in hand 
with the moral uprising; the great names of 
Copernicus, Bruno, Kepler, and Galileo show that 
the mind of man was breaking the fetters that 



no THE WORLD MOVEMENT 

had cramped it; and for the first time experi- 
mentation was used as a check upon observation 
and theorization. Since then, century by cen- 
tury, the changes have increased in rapidity and 
complexity, and have attained their maximum in 
both respects during the century just past. In- 
stead of being directed by one or two dominant 
peoples, as was the case with all similar move- 
ments of the past, the new movement was shared 
by many different nations. From every stand- 
point it has been of infinitely greater moment than 
anything hitherto seen. Not in one but in many 
different peoples there has been extraordinary 
growth in wealth,- in population, in power of 
organization, and in mastery over mechanical 
activity and natural resources. All of this has 
been accompanied and signalized by an immense 
outburst of energy and restless initiative. The 
result is as varied as it is striking. 

In the first place, representatives of this civili- 
zation, by their conquest of space, were enabled 
to spread into all the practically vacant conti- 
nents, while at the same time, by their triumphs 
in organization and mechanical invention, they 
acquired an unheard-of military superiority as 
compared with their former rivals. To these two 
facts is primarily due the further fact that for the 
first time there is really something that approaches 
a world civilization, a world movement. The 



THE WORLD MOVEMENT m 

spread of the European peoples since the days of 
Ferdinand the CathoHc and Ivan the Terrible has 
been across every sea and over every continent. 
In places the conquests have been ethnic ; that is, 
there has been a new wandering of the peoples, 
and new commonwealths have sprung up in which 
the people are entirely or mainly of European 
blood. This is what happened in the temperate 
and subtropical regions of the Western Hemi- 
sphere, in Australia, in portions of northern Asia 
and southern Africa. In other places the conquest 
has been purely political, the Europeans repre- 
senting for the most part merely a small caste of 
soldiers and administrators, as in most of tropical 
Asia and Africa, and in much of tropical America. 
Finally, here and there instances occur where 
there has been no conquest at all, but where an 
alien people is profoundly and radically changed 
by the mere impact of Western civilization. The 
most extraordinary instance of this, of course, is 
Japan; for Japan's growth and change during the 
last half-century has been in many ways the most 
striking phenomenon of all history. Intensely 
proud of her past history, intensely loyal to cer- 
tain of her past traditions, she has yet with a 
single effort wrenched herself free from all ham- 
pering ancient ties, and with a bound has taken 
her place among the leading civilized nations of 
mankind. 



112 THE WORLD MOVEMENT 

There are, of course, many grades between these 
different types of influence, but the net outcome 
of what has occurred during the last four centuries 
is that civilization of the European type now 
exercises a more or less profound effect over prac- 
tically the entire world. There are nooks and 
comers to which it has not yet penetrated; but 
there is at present no large space of territory in 
which the general movement of civilized activity 
does not make itself more or less felt. This rep- 
resents something wholly different from what has 
ever hitherto been seen. In the greatest days of 
Roman dominion the influence of Rome was felt 
over only a relatively small portion of the world's 
surface. Over much the larger part of the world 
the process of change and development was abso- 
lutely unaffected by anything that occurred in the 
Roman Empire; and those communities the play 
of whose influence was felt in action and reac- 
tion, and in interaction, among themselves, were 
grouped immediately around the Mediterranean. 
Now, however, the whole world is bound together 
as never before; the bonds are sometimes those 
of hatred rather than love, but they are bonds 
nevertheless. 

Frowning or hopeful, every man of leadership 
in any line of thought or effort must now look 
beyond the limits of his own coimtry. The stu- 
dent of sociology may live in Berlin or Saint Peters- 



THE WORLD MOVEMENT 113 

burg, Rome or London, or he may live in Mel- 
bourne or San Francisco or Buenos Ayres ; but in 
whatever city he lives, he must pay heed to the 
studies of men who live in each of the other cities. 
When in America we study labor problems and 
attempt to deal with subjects such as life-insur- 
ance for wage- workers, we turn to see what you 
do here in Germany, and we also turn to see what 
the far-off commonwealth of New Zealand is 
doing. When a great German scientist is warring 
against the most dreaded enemies of mankind, 
creatures of infinitesimal size which the micro- 
scope reveals in his blood, he may spend his holi- 
days of study in central Africa or in eastern Asia; 
and he must know what is accomplished in the 
laboratories of Tokio, just as he must know the 
details of that practical application of science 
which has changed the Isthmus of Panama from 
a death-trap into what is almost a health resort. 
Every progressive in China is striving to introduce 
Western methods of education and administration, 
and hundreds of European and American books 
are now translated into Chinese. The influence 
of European governmental principles is strikingly 
illustrated by the fact that admiration for them 
has broken down the iron barriers of Moslem con- 
servatism, so that their introduction has become 
a burning question in Turkey and Persia; while 
the very unrest, the impatience of European or 



114 



THE WORLD MOVEMENT 



American control, in India, Egypt, or the Philip- 
pines, takes the form of demanding that the gov- 
ernment be assimilated more closely to what it is 
in England or the United States. The deeds and 
works of any great statesman, the preachings of 
any great ethical, social, or political teacher, now 
find echoes in both hemispheres and in every con- 
tinent. From a new discovery in science to a 
new method of combating or applying socialism, 
there is no movement of note which can take 
place in any part of the globe without powerfully 
affecting masses of people in Europe, America, 
and Australia, in Asia and Africa. For weal or 
for woe, the peoples of mankind are knit together 
far closer than ever before. 

So much for the geographical side of the ex- 
pansion of modem civilization. But only a few 
of the many and intense activities of modem 
civilization have foimd their expression on this 
side. The movement has been just as striking in 
its conquest over natural forces, in its searching 
inquiry into and about the soul of things. 

The conquest over Nature has included an ex- 
traordinary increase in every form of knowledge 
of the world we Hve in, and also an extraordinary 
increase in the power of utilizing the forces of 
Nature. In both directions the advance has been 
very great during the past four or five centuries, 
and in both directions it has gone on with ever- 



THE WORLD MOVEMENT 115 

increasing rapidity during the last century. After 
the great age of Rome had passed, the boundaries 
of knowledge shrank, and in many cases it was 
not tmtil well-nigh our own times that her domain 
was once again pushed beyond the ancient land- 
marks. About the year 150 A. D., Ptolemy, the 
geographer, published his map of central Africa 
and the sources of the Nile, and this map was more 
accurate than any which we had as late as 1850 
A. D. More was known of physical science, and 
more of the truth about the physical world was 
guessed at, in the days of Pliny, than was known or 
guessed until the modem movement began. The 
case was the same as regards military science. At 
the close of the Middle Ages the weapons were 
what they had always been — sword, shield, bow, 
spear; and any improvement in them was more 
than offset by the loss in knowledge of military 
organization, in the science of war, and in military 
leadership since the days of Hannibal and Caesar. 
A himdred years ago, when this imiversity was 
foimded, the methods of transportation did not 
differ in the essentials from what they had been 
among the highly civilized nations of antiquity. 
Travellers and merchandise went by land in 
wheeled vehicles or on beasts of burden, and by 
sea in boats propelled by sails or by oars; and 
news was conveyed as it always had been con- 
veyed. What improvements there had been had 



ii6 THE WORLD MOVEMENT 

l)een in degree only and not in kind; and in some 
respects there had been retrogression rather than 
advance. There were many parts of Europe where 
the roads were certainly worse than the old 
Roman post-roads; and the Mediterranean Sea, 
for instance, was by no means as well policed as 
in the days of Trajan. Now steam and elec- 
tricity have worked a complete revolution; and 
the resulting immensely increased ease of commu- 
nication has in its turn completely changed all the 
physical questions of human life. A voyage from 
Egypt to England was nearly as serious an affair 
in the eighteenth century as in the second; and 
the news communications between the two lands 
were not materially improved. A graduate of 
your university to-day can go to mid-Asia or 
mid-Africa with far less consciousness of per- 
forming a feat of note than would have been the 
case a hundred years ago with a student who 
visited Sicily and Andalusia. Moreover, the in- 
vention and use of machinery run by steam or 
electricity have worked a revolution in industry 
as great as the revolution in transportation; so 
that here again the difference between ancient 
and modem civilization is one not merely of 
degree but of kind. In many vital respects the 
huge modem city differs more from all preceding 
cities than any of these differed one from the 
other; and the giant factory town is of and by 



THE WORLD MOVEMENT 117 

itself one of the most formidable problems of 
modem life. 

Steam and electricity have given the race do- 
minion over land and water such as it never 
had before; and now the conquest of the air is 
directly impending. As books preserve thought 
through time, so the telegraph and the telephone 
transmit it through the space they annihilate, 
and therefore minds are swayed one by another 
without regard to the limitations of space and 
time which formerly forced each community to 
work in comparative isolation. It is the same 
with the body as with the brain. The machinery 
of the factory and the farm enormously multiplies 
bodily skill and vigor. Countless trained intel- 
ligences are at work to teach us how to avoid 
or counteract the effects of waste. Of course 
some of the agents in the modern scientific de- 
velopment of natural resources deal with resources 
of such a kind that their development means their 
destruction, so that exploitation on a grand scale 
means an intense rapidity of development pur- 
chased at the cost of a speedy exhaustion. The 
enormous and constantly increasing output of 
coal and iron necessarily means the approach of 
the day when our children's children, or their 
children's children, shall dwell in an ironless age 
— and, later on, in an age without coal — and will 
have to try to invent or develop new sources for 



ii8 THE WORLD MOVEMENT 

the production of heat and use of energy. But 
as regards many another natural resource, scien- 
tific civihzation teaches us how to preserve it 
through use. The best use of field and forest will 
leave them decade by decade, century by century, 
more fruitful ; and we have barely begun to use the 
indestructible power that comes from harnessed 
water. The conquests of surgery, of medicine, 
the conquests in the entire field of hygiene and 
sanitation, have been literally marvellous; the 
advances in the past century or two have been 
over more ground than was covered during the 
entire previous history of the human race. 

The advances in the realm of pure intellect 
have been of equal note, and they have been both 
intensive and extensive. Great virgin fields of 
learning and wisdom have been discovered by 
the few, and at the same time knowledge has 
spread among the many to a degree never dreamed 
of before. Old men among us have seen in their 
own generation the rise of the first rational sci- 
ence of the evolution of life. The astronomer and 
the chemist, the psychologist and the historian, 
and all their brethren in many different fields of 
wide endeavor, work with a training and knowl- 
edge and method which are in effect instruments 
of precision, differentiating their labors from the 
labors of their predecessors as the rifle is differ- 
entiated from the bow. 



THE WORLD MOVEMENT 119 

The play of new forces is as evident in the moral 
and spiritual worid as in the worid of the mind 
and the body. Forces for good and forces for 
evil are ever3rwhere evident, each acting with a 
hundred- or a thousandfold the intensity with 
which it acted in former ages. Over the whole 
earth the swing of the pendulum grows more and 
more rapid, the mainspring coils and spreads at 
a rate constantly quickening, the whole world 
movement is of constantly accelerating velocity. 

In this movement there are signs of much that 
bodes ill. The machinery is so highly geared, the 
tension and strain are so great, the effort and the 
output have alike so increased, that there is cause 
to dread the ruin that would come from any great 
accident, from any breakdown, and also the ruin 
that may come from the mere wearing out of the 
machine itself. The only previous civilization 
with which our modem civilization can be in any 
way compared is that period of Greco-Roman 
civilization extending, say, from the Athens of 
Themistocles to the Rome of Marcus Aurelius. 
Many of the forces and tendencies which were 
then at work are at work now. Knowledge, lux- 
ury, and refinement, wide material conquests, 
territorial administration on a vast scale, an in- 
crease in the mastery of mechanical appliances 
and in applied science — all these mark our civili- 
zation as they marked the wonderful civilization 



I20 THE WORLD MOVEMENT 

that flourished in the Mediterranean lands twenty 
centuries ago; and they preceded the downfall 
of the older civilization. Yet the differences are 
many, and some of them are quite as striking 
as the similarities. The single fact that the old 
civilization was based upon slavery shows the 
chasm that separates the two. Let me point out 
one further and very significant difference in the 
development of the two civilizations, a difference 
so obvious that it is astonishing that it has not 
been dwelt upon by men of letters. 

One of the prime dangers of civilization has 
always been its tendency to cause the loss of 
virile fighting virtues, of the fighting edge. When 
men get too comfortable and lead too luxurious 
lives, there is always danger lest the softness eat 
like an acid into their manliness of fibre. The 
barbarian, because of the very conditions of his 
life, is forced to keep and develop certain hardy 
qualities which the man of civilization tends to 
lose, whether he be clerk, factory hand, mer- 
chant, or even a certain type of farmer. Now, I 
will not assert that in modem civilized society 
these tendencies have been wholly overcome; but 
there has been a much more successful effort to 
overcome them than was the case in the early 
civilizations. This is curiously shown by the 
military history of the Greco-Roman period as 
compared with the history of the last four or five 



THE WORLD MOVEMENT 121 

centuries here in Europe and among nations of 
European descent. In the Grecian and Roman 
mihtary history the change was steadily from a 
citizen army to an army of mercenaries. In the 
days of the early greatness of Athens, Thebes, 
and Sparta, in the days when the Roman republic 
conquered what world it knew, the armies were 
filled with citizen soldiers. But gradually the 
citizens refused to serve in the armies, or became 
unable to render good service. The Greek states 
described by Polybius, with but few exceptions, 
hired others to do their fighting for them. The 
Romans of the days of Augustus had utterly 
ceased to furnish any cavalry, and were rapidly 
ceasing to furnish any infantry, to the legions and 
cohorts. When the civilization came to an end, 
there were no longer citizens in the ranks of the 
soldiers. The change from the citizen army to the 
army of mercenaries had been completed. 

Now the exact reverse has been the case with 
us in modern times. A few centuries ago the 
mercenary soldier was the principal figure in most 
armies, and in great numbers of cases the mer- 
cenary soldier was an alien. In the wars of re- 
ligion in France, in the Thirty Years' War in 
Germany, in the wars that immediately there- 
after marked the beginning of the break-up of 
the great Polish kingdom, the regiments and 
brigades of foreign soldiers formed a striking and 



122 THE WORLD MOVEMENT 

leading feature in every army. Too often the 
men of the country in which the fighting took 
place played merely the ignoble part of victims, 
the burghers and peasants appearing in but lim- 
ited numbers in the mercenary armies by which 
they were plundered. Gradually this has all 
changed, until now practically every army is a 
citizen army, and the mercenary has almost dis- 
appeared, while the army exists on a vaster scale 
than ever before in history. This is so among 
the military monarchies of Europe. In our own 
Civil War of the United States the same thing 
occurred, peaceful people as we are. At that 
time more than two generations had passed since 
the war of independence. During the whole of 
that period the people had been engaged in no 
life-and-death struggle; and yet, when the Civil 
War broke out, and after some costly and bitter 
lessons at the beginning, the fighting spirit of the 
people was shown to better advantage than ever 
before. The war was peculiarly a war for a 
principle, a war waged by each side for an ideal, 
and while faults and shortcomings were plentiful 
among the combatants, there was comparatively 
little sordidness of motive or conduct. In such 
a giant struggle, where across the warp of so many 
interests is shot the woof of so many purposes, 
dark strands and bright, strands sombre and bril- 
liant, are always intertwined; inevitably there 



THE WORLD MOVEMENT 123 

was corruption here and there in the Civil War; 
but all the leaders on both sides and the great 
majority of the enormous masses of fighting men 
wholly disregarded, and were wholly uninfluenced 
by, pecuniary considerations. There were, of 
course, foreigners who came over to serve as 
soldiers of fortime for money or for love of ad- 
venture; but the foreign-bom citizens served in 
much the same proportion, and from the same 
motives, as the native-born. Taken as a whole, 
it was, even more than the Revolutionary War, a 
true citizens' fight, and the armies of Grant and 
Lee were as emphatically citizen armies as the 
Athenian, Theban, or Spartan armies in the great 
age of Greece, or as a Roman army in the days of 
the republic. 

Another striking contrast in the course of 
modern civilization as compared with the later 
stages of the Greco-Roman or classic civilization 
is to be found in the relations of wealth and 
politics. In classic times, as the civilization ad- 
vanced toward its zenith, politics became a rec- 
ognized means of accumulating great wealth. 
Caesar was again and again on the verge of bank- 
ruptcy; he spent an enormous fortune; and he 
recouped himself by the money which he made out 
of his political-military career. Augustus estab- 
lished imperial Rome on firm foundations by 
the use he made of the huge fortune he had ac- 



124 



THE WORLD MOVEMENT 



quired by plunder. What a contrast is offered by 
the careers of Washington and Lincoln! There 
were a few exceptions in ancient days; but the 
immense majority of the Greeks and the Romans, 
as their civilizations culminated, accepted money- 
making on a large scale as one of the incidents of 
a successful public career. Now all of this is in 
sharp contrast to what has happened within the 
last two or three centuries. During this time 
there has been a steady growth away from the 
theory that money-making is permissible in an 
honorable public career. In this respect the 
standard has been constantly elevated, and things 
which statesmen had no hesitation in doing three 
centuries or two centuries ago, and which did not 
seriously hurt a public career even a century ago, 
are now utterly impossible. Wealthy men still 
exercise a large, and sometimes an improper, in- 
fluence in politics, but it is apt to be an indirect 
influence; and in the advanced states the mere 
suspicion that the wealth of public men is ob- 
tained or added to as an incident of their public 
careers will bar them from public life. Speaking 
generally, wealth may very greatly influence mod- 
ern political life, but it is not acquired in polit- 
ical life. The colonial administrators, German or 
American, French or English, of this generation 
lead careers which, as compared with the careers 
of other men of like ability, show too little rather 



THE WORLD MOVEMENT 125 

than too much regard for money-making; and 
literally a world scandal would be caused by 
conduct which a Roman proconsul would have 
regarded as moderate, and which would not have 
been especially uncommon even in the administra- 
tion of England a century and a half ago. On 
the whole, the great statesmen of the last few 
generations have been either men of moderate 
means or, if men of wealth, men whose wealth 
was diminished rather than increased by their 
public services. 

I have dwelt on these points merely because it 
is well to emphasize in the most emphatic fashion 
the fact that in many respects there is a complete 
lack of analogy between the civilization of to-day 
and the only other civilization in any way com- 
parable to it, that of the ancient Greco-Roman 
lands. There are, of course, many points in which 
the analogy is close, and in some of these points 
the resemblances are as ominous as they are stri- 
king. But most striking of all is the fact that in 
point of physical extent, of wide diversity of 
interest, and of extreme velocity of movement, 
the present civilization can be compared to noth- 
ing that has ever gone before. It is now literally 
a world movement, and the movement is grow- 
ing ever more rapid and is ever reaching into 
new fields. Any considerable influence exerted at 
one point is certain to be felt with greater or less 



126 THE WORLD MOVEMENT 

effect at almost every other point. Every path of 
activity open to the human intellect is followed 
with an eagerness and success never hitherto 
dreamed of. We have established complete lib- 
erty of conscience, and, in consequence, a com- 
plete liberty for mental activity. All free and 
daring souls have before them a well-nigh limit- 
less opening for endeavor of any kind. 

Hitherto every civilization that has arisen has 
been able to develop only a comparatively few 
activities; that is, its field of endeavor has been 
limited in kind as well as in locality. There have, 
of course, been great movements, but they were 
of practically only one form of activity; and, 
although usually this set in motion other kinds of 
activities, such was not always the case. The 
great religious movements have been the pre- 
eminent examples of this type. But they are not 
the only ones. Such peoples as the Mongols and 
the Phoenicians, at almost opposite poles of cul- 
tivation, have represented movements in which 
one element, military or commercial, so over- 
shadowed all other elements that the movement 
died out chiefly because it was one-sided. The 
extraordinary outburst of activity among the 
Mongols of the thirteenth century was almost 
purely a military movement, without even any 
great administrative side; and it was therefore 
well-nigh purely a movement of destruction. 



THE WORLD MOVEMENT 127 

The individual prowess and hardihood of the 
Mongols, and the perfection of their military or- 
ganization rendered their armies incomparably 
superior to those of any European, or any other 
Asiatic, power of that day. They conquered from 
the Yellow Sea to the Persian Gulf and the Adri- 
atic; they seized the imperial throne of China; 
they slew the Caliph in Bagdad; they founded 
dynasties in India. The fanaticism of Chris- 
tianity and the fanaticism of Mohammedanism 
were alike powerless against them. The valor 
of the bravest fighting men in Europe was impo- 
tent to check them. They trampled Russia into 
bloody mire beneath the hoofs of their horses; 
they drew red furrows of destruction across Po- 
land and Hungary ; they overthrew with ease any 
force from western Europe that dared encounter 
them. Yet they had no root of permanence; 
their work was mere evil while it lasted, and it 
did not last long; and when they vanished they 
left hardly a trace behind them. So the extraor- 
dinary Phoenician civilization was almost purely 
a mercantile, a business civilization, and though 
it left an impress on the life that came after, this 
impress was faint indeed compared to that left, 
for instance, by the Greeks with their many-sided 
development. Yet the Greek civilization itself 
fell because this many-sided development be- 
came too exclusively one of intellect, at the ex- 



128 THE WORLD MOVEMENT 

pense of character, at the expense of the funda- 
mental quaHties which fit men to govern both 
themselves and others. When the Greek lost the 
sterner virtues, when his soldiers lost the fighting 
edge, and his statesmen grew corrupt, while the 
people became a faction-torn and pleasure-loving 
rabble, then the doom of Greece was at hand, and 
not all their cultivation, their intellectual bril- 
liancy, their artistic development, their adroit- 
ness in speculative science, could save the Hel- 
lenic peoples as they bowed before the sword of 
the iron Roman. 

What is the lesson to us to-day? Are we to 
go the way of the older civilizations? The im- 
mense increase in the area of civilized activity 
to-day, so that it is nearly coterminous with the 
world's surface; the immense increase in the 
multitudinous variety of its activities; the im- 
mense increase in the velocity of the world move- 
ment — are all these to mean merely that the 
crash will be all the more complete and terrible 
when it comes? We can not be certain that the 
answer will be in the negative ; but of this we can 
be certain, that we shall not go down in ruin unless 
we deserve and earn our end. There is no neces- 
sity for us to fall; we can hew out our destiny for 
ourselves, if only we have the wit and the courage 
and the honesty. 

Personally, I do not believe that our civiliza- 



THE WORLD MOVEMENT 129 

tion will fall. I think that on the whole we have 
grown better and not worse. I think that on 
the whole the future holds more for us than even 
the great past has held. But, assuredly, the 
dreams of golden glory in the future will not come 
true unless, high of heart and strong of hand, by 
our own mighty deeds we make them come true. 
We can not afford to develop any one set of 
qualities, any one set of activities, at the cost of 
seeing others, equally necessary, atrophied. Nei- 
ther the military efficiency of the Mongol, the ex- 
traordinary business ability of the Phoenician, nor 
the subtle and polished intellect of the Greek 
availed to avert destruction. 

We, the men of to-day and of the future, need 
many qualities if we are to do our work well. 
We need, first of all and most important of all, 
the qualities which stand at the base of individual, 
of family life, the fundamental and essential qual- 
ities — the homely, e very-day, all-important vir- 
tues. If the average man will not work, if he has 
not in him the will and the power to be a good 
husband and father; if the average woman is not 
a good housewife, a good mother of many healthy 
children, then the state will topple, will go down, 
no matter what may be its brilliance of artistic 
development or material achievement. But these 
homely qualities are not enough. There must, 
in addition, be that power of organization, that 



I30 THE WORLD MOVEMENT 

power of working in common for a common end, 
which the German people have shown in such 
signal fashion during the last half-century. More- 
over, the things of the spirit are even more im- 
portant than the things of the body. We can 
well do without the hard intolerance and arid in- 
tellectual barrenness of what was worst in the 
theological systems of the past, but there has 
never been greater need of a high and fine religious 
spirit than at the present time. So, while we can 
laugh good-humoredly at some of the pretensions 
of modem philosophy in its various branches, it 
would be worse than folly on our part to ignore 
our need of intellectual leadership. Your own 
great Frederick once said that if he wished to 
punish a province he would leave it to be governed 
by philosophers; the sneer had in it an element 
of justice; and yet no one better than the great 
Frederick knew the value of philosophers, the 
value of men of science, men of letters, men of 
art. It would be a bad thing indeed to accept 
Tolstoi as a guide in social and moral matters; 
but it would also be a bad thing not to have Tol- 
stoi, not to profit by the lofty side of his teachings. 
There are plenty of scientific men whose hard 
arrogance, whose cynical materialism, whose dog- 
matic intolerance, put them on a level with the 
bigoted mediaeval ecclesiasticism which they de- 
nounce. Yet our debt to scientific men is incal- 



THE WORLD MOVEMENT 131 

culable, and our civilization of to-day would have 
reft from it all that which most highly distin- 
guishes it if the work of the great masters of 
science during the past four centuries were now 
undone or forgotten. Never has philanthropy, 
humanitarianism, seen such development as now; 
and though we must all beware of the folly, and 
the viciousness no worse than folly, which marks 
the believer in the perfectibility of man when his 
heart runs away with his head, or when vanity 
usurps the place of conscience, yet we must re- 
member also that it is only by working along the 
lines laid down by the philanthropists, by the 
lovers of mankind, that we can be sure of lifting 
our civilization to a higher and more permanent 
plane of well-being than was ever attained by any 
preceding civilization. Unjust war is to be ab- 
horred ; but woe to the nation that does not make 
ready to hold its own in time of need against all 
who would harm it! And woe thrice over to the 
nation in which the average man loses the fighting 
edge, loses the power to serve as a soldier if the 
day of need should arise! 

It is no impossible dream to build up a civili- 
zation in which morality, ethical development, 
and a true feeling of brotherhood shall all alike 
be divorced from false sentimentality, and from 
the rancorous and evil passions which, curiously 
enough, so often accompany professions of senti- 



132 THE WORLD MOVEMENT 

mental attachment to the rights of man ; in which 
a high material development in the things of the 
body shall be achieved without subordination of 
the things of the soul; in which there shall be a 
genuine desire for peace and justice without loss 
of those virile qualities without which no love of 
peace or justice shall avail any race; in which 
the fullest development of scientific research, the 
great distinguishing feature of our present civili- 
zation, shall yet not imply a belief that intellect 
can ever take the place of character — for, from 
the standpoint of the nation as of the individual, 
it is character that is the one vital possession. 

Finally, this world movement of civilization, 
this movement which is now felt throbbing in 
every comer of the globe, should bind the na- 
tions of the world together while yet leaving 
unimpaired that love of country in the individual 
citizen which in the present stage of the world's 
progress is essential to the world's well-being. 
You, my hearers, and I who speak to you, belong 
to different nations. Under modem conditions 
the books we read, the news sent by telegraph to 
our newspapers, the strangers we meet, half of 
the things we hear and do each day, all tend to 
bring us into touch with other peoples. Each 
people can do justice to itself only if it does jus- 
tice to others; but each people can do its part in 
the world movement for all only if it first does 



THE WORLD MOVEMENT 133 

its duty within its own household. The good 
citizen must be a good citizen of his own country 
first before he can with advantage be a citizen of 
the world at large. I wish you well. I believe 
in you and your future. I admire and wonder at 
the extraordinary greatness and variety of your 
achievements in so many and such widely different 
fields; and my admiration and regard are all the 
greater, and not the less, because I am so pro- 
found a believer in the institutions and the people 
of my own land. 



CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC 



CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC ^ 

STRANGE and impressive associations rise in 
the mind of a man from the New Worid 
who speaks before this august body in this 
ancient institution of learning. Before his eyes 
pass the shadows of mighty kings and warHke 
nobles, of great masters of law and theology; 
through the shining dust of the dead centuries 
he sees crowded figures that tell of the power 
and learning and splendor of times gone by; and 
he sees also the innumerable host of humble stu- 
dents to whom clerkship meant emancipation, 
to whom it was well-nigh the only outlet from the 
dark thraldom of the Middle Ages. 

This was the most famous university of medi- 
aeval Europe at a time when no one dreamed that 
there was a New World to discover. Its services 
to the cause of human knowledge already stretched 
far back into the remote past at the time when my 
forefathers, three centuries ago, were among the 
sparse bands of traders, ploughmen, wood-choppers, 
and fisherfolk who, in hard struggle with the iron 
unfriendliness of the Indian-haunted land, were 

^ Delivered at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910. 
137 



138 CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC 

laying the foundations of what has now become 
the giant repubHc of the West. To conquer a 
continent, to tame the shaggy roughness of wild 
nature, means grim warfare; and the generations 
engaged in it can not keep, still less add to, the 
stores of garnered wisdom which once were theirs, 
and which are still in the hands of their breth- 
ren who dwell in the old land. To conquer the 
wilderness means to wrest victory from the same 
hostile forces with which mankind struggled in 
the immemorial infancy of our race. The primeval 
conditions must be met by primeval qualities 
which are incompatible with the retention of much 
that has been painfully acquired by humanity 
as through the ages it has striven upward to- 
ward civilization. In conditions so primitive 
there can be but a primitive culture. At first 
only the rudest schools can be established, for no 
others would meet the needs of the hard-driven, 
sinewy folk who thrust forward the frontier in the 
teeth of savage man and savage nature ; and many 
years elapse before any of these schools can de- 
velop into seats of higher learning and broader 
culture. 

The pioneer days pass ; the stump-dotted clear- 
ings expand into vast stretches of fertile farm- 
land ; the stockaded clusters of log cabins change 
into towns; the hunters of game, the fellers of 
trees, the rude frontier traders and tillers of the 



CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC 139 

soil, the men who wander all their lives long 
through the wilderness as the heralds and har- 
bingers of an oncoming civilization, themselves 
vanish before the civilization for which they have 
prepared the way. The children of their suc- 
cessors and supplant ers, and then their children 
and children's children, change and develop with 
extraordinary rapidity. The conditions accen- 
tuate vices and virtues, energy and ruthlessness, 
all the good qualities and all the defects of an 
intense individualism, self-reliant, self-centred, far 
more conscious of its rights than of its duties, 
and blind to its own shortcomings. To the hard 
materialism of the frontier days succeeds the hard 
materialism of an industrialism even more in- 
tense and absorbing than that of the older nations ; 
although these themselves have likewise already 
entered on the age of a complex and predomi- 
nantly industrial civilization. 

As the country grows, its people, who have won 
success in so many lines, turn back to try to re- 
cover the possessions of the mind and the spirit, 
which perforce their fathers threw aside in or- 
der better to wage the first rough battles for the 
continent their children inherit. The leaders of 
thought and of action grope their way forward 
to a new life, realizing, sometimes dimly, some- 
times clear-sightedly, that the life of material gain, 
whether for a nation or an individual, is of value 



140 



CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC 



only as a foundation, only as there is added to it 
the uplift that comes from devotion to loftier 
ideals. The new life thus sought can in part be 
developed afresh from what is round about in 
the New World; but it can be developed in full 
only by freely drawing upon the treasure-houses 
of the Old World, upon the treasures stored in 
the ancient abodes of wisdom and learning, such 
as this where I speak to-day. It is a mistake for 
any nation merely to copy another; but it is an 
even greater mistake, it is a proof of weakness in 
any nation, not to be anxious to learn from an- 
other, and willing and able to adapt that learning 
to the new national conditions and make it fruit- 
ful and productive therein. It is for us of the 
New World to sit at the feet of the Gamaliel of 
the Old; then, if we have the right stuff in us, 
we can show that Paul in his turn can become a 
teacher as well as a scholar. 

To-day I shall speak to you on the subject of 
individual citizenship, the one subject of vital 
importance to you, my hearers, and to me and 
my countrymen, because you and we are citi- 
zens of great democratic republics. A democratic 
republic such as each of ours — an effort to realize 
in its full sense government by, of, and for the 
people — represents the most gigantic of all pos- 
sible social experiments, the one fraught with 
greatest possibilities alike for good and for evil. 



CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC 141 

The success of republics like yours and like ours 
means the glory, and our failure the despair, of 
mankind; and for you and for us the question of 
the quality of the individual citizen is supreme. 
Under other forms of government, under the rule 
of one man or of a very few men, the quality of 
the rulers is all-important. If, under such gov- 
ernments, the quality of the rulers is high enough, 
then the nation may for generations lead a bril- 
liant career, and add substantially to the sum of 
world achievement, no matter how low the quality 
of the average citizen ; because the average citizen 
is an almost negligible quantity in working out the 
final results of that type of national greatness. 

But with you and with us the case is different. 
With you here, and with us in my own home, in 
the long nm, success or failure will be conditioned 
upon the way in which the average man, the 
average woman, does his or her duty, first in the 
ordinary, every-day affairs of life, and next in 
those great occasional crises which call for the 
heroic virtues. The average citizen must be a 
good citizen if our republics are to succeed. The 
stream will not permanently rise higher than the 
main source; and the main source of national 
power and national greatness is fotmd in the aver- 
age citizenship of the nation. Therefore it be- 
hooves us to do our best to see that the standard 
of the average citizen is kept high; and the aver- 



142 CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC 

age can not be kept high unless the standard of 
the leaders is very much higher. 

It is well if a large proportion of the leaders 
in any republic, in any democracy, are, as a 
matter of course, drawn from the classes repre- 
sented in this audience to-day ; but only provided 
that those classes possess the gifts of sympathy 
with plain people and of devotion to great ideals. 
You and those like you have received special ad- 
vantages; you have all of you had the opportu- 
nity for m.ental training; many of you have had 
leisure; most of you have had a chance for the 
enjoyment of life far greater than comes to the 
majority of your fellows. To you and your kind 
much has been given, and from you much should 
be expected. Yet there are certain failings against 
which it is especially incumbent that both men 
of trained and cultivated intellect, and men of 
inherited wealth and position, should especially 
guard themselves, because to these failings they 
are especially liable; and if yielded to, their — 
your — chances of useful service are at an end. 

Let the man of learning, the man of lettered 
leisure, beware of that queer and cheap tempta- 
tion to pose to himself and to others as the cynic, 
as the man who has outgrown emotions and be- 
liefs, the man to whom good and evil are as one. 
The poorest way to face life is to face it with a 
sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of 



CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC 143 

twisted pride in cynicism; there are many who 
confine themselves to criticism of the way others 
do what they themselves dare not even attempt. 
There is no more unhealthy being, no man less 
worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, 
or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbe- 
lief toward all that is great and lofty, whether 
in achievement or in that noble effort which, 
even if it fails, comes second to achievement. 
A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readi- 
ness to criticise work which the critic himself never 
tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which 
will not accept contact with life's realities — all 
these are marks, not, as the possessor would fain 
think, of superiority, but of weakness. They 
mark the men unfit to bear their part manfully 
in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the 
affectation of contempt for the achievements of 
others, to hide from others and from themselves 
their own weakness. The role is easy; there is 
none easier, save only the role of the man who 
sneers alike at both criticism and performance. 

It is not the critic who counts; not the man 
who points out how the strong man stumbles, or 
where the doer of deeds could have done them 
better. The credit belongs to the man who is 
actually in the arena, whose face is marred by 
dust and sweat and blood; who strives val- 
iantly; who errs, and comes short again and 



144 CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC 

again, because there is no effort without error and 
shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do 
the deeds ; who knows the great enthusiasms, the 
great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy 
cause; who at the best knows in the end the tri- 
umph of high achievement, and who at the worst, 
if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so 
that his place shall never be with those cold and 
timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat. 
Shame on the man of cultivated taste who per- 
mits refinement to develop into a fastidiousness 
that unfits him for doing the rough work of a 
workaday world. Among the free peoples who 
govern themselves there is but a small field of 
usefulness open for the men of cloistered life who 
shrink from contact with their fellows. Still 
less room is there for those who deride or sHght 
what is done by those who actually bear the 
bnmt of the day; nor yet for those others who 
always profess that they would like to take action, 
if only the conditions of Hfe were not what they 
actually are. The man who does nothing cuts 
the same sordid figure in the pages of history, 
whether he be cynic, or fop, or voluptuary. There 
is little use for the being whose tepid soul knows 
nothing of the great and generous emotion, of 
the high pride, the stem belief, the lofty enthusi- 
asm, of the men who quell the storm and ride the 
thunder. Well for these men if they succeed; 



CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC 145 

well also, though not so well, if they fail, given 
only that they have nobly ventured, and have put 
forth all their heart and strength. It is war- 
worn Hotspur, spent with hard fighting, he of 
the many errors and the valiant end, over whose 
memory we love to linger, not over the memory 
of the yoimg lord who "but for the vile guns 
would have been a soldier." 

France has taught many lessons to other na- 
tions: surely one of the most important is the 
lesson her whole history teaches, that a high 
artistic and literary development is compatible 
with notable leadership in arms and statecraft. 
The brilHant gallantry of the French soldier has 
for many centuries been proverbial; and during 
these same centuries at every court in Europe the 
"freemasons of fashion" have treated the French 
tongue as their common speech ; while every artist 
and man of letters, and every man of science able 
to appreciate that marvellous instrument of pre- 
cision, French prose, has turned toward France 
for aid and inspiration. How long the leader- 
ship in arms and letters has lasted is ctuiously 
illustrated by the fact that the earliest master- 
piece in a modem tongue is the splendid French 
epic which tells of Roland's doom and the ven- 
geance of Charlemagne when the lords of the 
Frankish host were stricken at Roncesvalles. 

Let those who have, keep, let those who have 



146 CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC 

not, strive to attain, a high standard of cultiva- 
tion and scholarship. Yet let us remember that 
these stand second to certain other things. There 
is need of a sound body, and even more need of a 
sound mind. But above mind and above body 
stands character — the sum of those qualities 
which we mean when we speak of a man's force 
and courage, of his good faith and sense of honor. 
I believe in exercise for the body, always pro- 
vided that we keep in mind that physical develop- 
ment is a means and not an end. I believe, of 
course, in giving to all the people a good education. 
But the education must contain much besides 
book-learning in order to be really good. We 
must ever remember that no keenness and sub- 
tleness of intellect, no polish, no cleverness, in 
any way make up for the lack of the great solid 
qualities. Self-restraint, self-mastery, common 
sense, the power of accepting individual respon- 
sibility and yet of acting in conjunction with 
others, courage and resolution — these are the 
qualities which mark a masterful people. With- 
out them no people can control itself, or save it- 
self from being controlled from the outside. I 
speak to a brilliant assemblage ; I speak in a great 
university which represents the flower of the high- 
est intellectual development ; I pay all homage to 
intellect, and to elaborate and specialized training 
of the intellect; and yet I know I shall have the 



CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC 147 

assent of all of you present when I add that more 
important still are the commonplace, every-day 
qualities and virtues. 

Such ordinary, every-day qualities include the 
will and the power to work, to fight at need, and 
to have plenty of healthy children. The need 
that the average man shall work is so obvious as 
hardly to warrant insistence. There are a few 
people in every country so bom that they can lead 
lives of leisure. These fill a useful function if 
they make it evident that leisure does not mean 
idleness; for some of the most valuable work 
needed by civilization is essentially non-remuner- 
ative in its character, and of course the people 
who do this work should in large part be drawn 
from those to whom remuneration is an object of 
indifference. But the average man must earn his 
own livelihood. He should be trained to do so, 
and he should be trained to feel that he occupies 
a contemptible position if he does not do so ; that 
he is not an object of envy if he is idle, at which- 
ever end of the social scale he stands, but an ob- 
ject of contempt, an object of derision. 

In the next place, the good man should be both 
a strong and a brave man; that is, he should be 
able to fight, he should be able to serve his coun- 
try as a soldier, if the need arises. There are well- 
meaning philosophers who declaim against the 
unrighteousness of war. They are right only if 



148 CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC 

they lay all their emphasis upon the unrighteous- 
ness. War is a dreadful thing, and unjust war is 
a crime against humanity. But it is such a 
crime because it is imjust, not because it is war. 
The choice must ever be in favor of righteousness, 
and this whether the alternative be peace or 
whether the alternative be war. The question 
must not be merely, Is there to be peace or war? 
The question must be, Is the right to prevail? 
Are the great laws of righteousness once more to 
be fulfilled? And the answer from a strong and 
virile people must be, ''Yes," whatever the cost. 
Every honorable effort should always be made to 
avoid war, just as every honorable effort should 
always be made by the individual in private life 
to keep out of a brawl, to keep out of trouble; 
but no self-respecting individual, no self-respect- 
ing nation, can or ought to submit to wrong. 

Finally, even more important than ability to 
work, even more important than ability to fight 
at need, is it to remember that the chief of bless- 
ings for any nation is that it shall leave its seed 
to inherit the land. It was the crown of blessings 
in BibHcal times; and it is the crown of blessings 
now. The greatest of all curses is the curse of 
sterility, and the severest of all condemnations 
should be that visited upon wilful sterility. The 
first essential in any civilization is that the man 
and the woman shall be father and mother of 



CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC 149 

healthy children, so that the race shall increase 
and not decrease. If this is not so, if through 
no fault of the society there is failure to increase, 
it is a great misfortune. If the failure is due 
to deliberate and wilful fault, then it is not merely 
a misfortune, it is one of those crimes of ease and 
self-indulgence, of shrinking from pain and effort 
and risk, which in the long run Nature punishes 
more heavily than any other. If we of the great 
republics, if we, the free people who claim to 
have emancipated ourselves from the thraldom of 
wrong and error, bring down on our heads the 
curse that comes upon the wilfully barren, then 
it will be an idle waste of breath to prattle of 
our achievements, to boast of all that we have 
done. No refinement of Hfe, no delicacy of taste, 
no material progress, no sordid heaping up of 
riches, no sensuous development of art and liter- 
ature, can in any way compensate for the loss of 
the great fundamental virtues ; and of these great 
fundamental virtues the greatest is the race's 
power to perpetuate the race. 

Character must show itself in the man's per- 
formance both of the duty he owes himself and 
of the duty he owes the state. The man's fore- 
most duty is owed to himself and his family ; and 
he can do this duty only by earning money, by 
providing what is essential to material well-being; 
it is only after this has been done that he can hope 



ISO CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC 

to build a higher superstructure on the soHd ma- 
terial foundation; it is only after this has been 
done that he can help in movements for the gen- 
eral well-being. He must pull his own weight 
first, and only after this can his surplus strength 
be of use to the general public. It is not good to 
excite that bitter laughter which expresses con- 
tempt; and contempt is what we feel for the 
being whose enthusiasm to benefit mankind is 
such that he is a burden to those nearest him; 
who wishes to do great things for humanity in the 
abstract, but who can not keep his wife in comfort 
or educate his children. 

Nevertheless, while laying all stress on this 
point, while not merely acknowledging but in- 
sisting upon the fact that there must be a basis 
of material well-being for the individual as for 
the nation, let us with equal emphasis insist that 
this material well-being represents nothing but 
the foundation, and that the foimdation, though 
indispensable, is worthless imless upon it is raised 
the superstructure of a higher life. That is why 
I decline to recognize the mere multimillionaire, 
the man of mere wealth, as an asset of value to 
any coimtry; and especially as not an asset to 
my own country. If he has earned or uses his 
wealth in a way that makes him of real benefit, of 
real use — and such is often the case — why, then 
he does become an asset of worth. But it is the 



CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC 151 

way in which it has been earned or used, and not 
the mere fact of wealth, that entitles him to the 
credit. There is need in business, as in most other 
forms of human activity, of the great guiding in- 
telligences. Their places can not be supplied by 
any number of lesser intelligences. It is a good 
thing that they should have ample recognition, 
ample reward. But we must not transfer our 
admiration to the reward instead of to the deed 
rewarded; and if what should be the reward 
exists without the service having been rendered, 
then admiration will come only from those who 
are mean of soul. The truth is that, after a cer- 
tain measure of tangible material success or re- 
ward has been achieved, the question of increasing 
it becomes of constantly less importance compared 
to other things that can be done in life. It is a 
bad thing for a nation to raise and to admire a 
false standard of success; and there can be no 
falser standard than that set by the deification 
of material well-being in and for itself. The man 
who, for any cause for which he is himself ac- 
countable, has failed to support himself and those 
for whom he is responsible, ought to feel that he 
has fallen lamentably short in his prime duty. 
But the man who, having far surpassed the limit 
of providing for the wants, both of body and mind, 
of himself and of those depending upon him, then 
piles up a great fortune, for the acquisition or 



152 CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC 

retention of which he returns no corresponding 
benefit to the nation as a whole, should himself 
be made to feel that, so far from being a desira- 
ble, he is an unworthy, citizen of the community ; 
that he is to be neither admired nor envied; that 
his right-thinking fellow countrymen put him low 
in the scale of citizenship, and leave him to be 
consoled by the admiration of those whose level 
of purpose is even lower than his own. 

My position as regards the moneyed interests 
can be put in a few words. In every civilized 
society property rights must be carefully safe- 
guarded; ordinarily, and in the great majority 
of cases, human rights and property rights are 
fimdamentally and in the long run identical; but 
when it clearly appears that there is a real con- 
flict between them, himian rights must have the 
upper hand, for property belongs to man and not 
man to property. 

In fact, it is essential to good citizenship clearly 
to understand that there are certain qualities 
which we in a democracy are prone to admire in 
and of themselves, which ought by rights to be 
judged admirable or the reverse solely from the 
standpoint of the use made of them. Foremost 
among these I should include two very distinct 
gifts — the gift of money-making and the gift of 
oratory. Money-making, the money touch, I 
have spoken of above. It is a quality which in 



CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC 153 

a moderate degree is essential. It may be use- 
ful when developed to a very great degree, but 
only if accompanied and controlled by other 
qualities; and without such control the possessor 
tends to develop into one of the least attractive 
types produced by a modem industrial democracy. 
So it is with the orator. It is highly desirable 
that a leader of opinion in a democracy should be 
able to state his views clearly and convincingly. 
But all that the oratory can do of value to the 
commimity is to enable the man thus to explain 
himself; if it enables the orator to persuade his 
hearers to put false values on things, it merely 
makes him a power for mischief. Some excellent 
public servants have not the gift at all, and must 
rely upon their deeds to speak for them; and un- 
less the oratory does represent genuine conviction 
based on good common sense and able to be trans- 
lated into efficient performance, then the better 
the oratory the greater the damage to the pubHc 
it deceives. Indeed, it is a sign of marked polit- 
ical weakness in any commonwealth if the people 
tend to be carried away by mere oratory, if they 
tend to value words in and for themselves, as 
divorced from the deeds for which they are sup- 
posed to stand. The phrase-maker, the phrase- 
monger, the ready talker, however great his power, 
whose speech does not make for courage, sobriety, 
and right understanding, is simply a noxious ele- 



154 CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC 

ment in the body politic, and it speaks ill for the 
public if he has influence over them. To admire 
the gift of oratory without regard to the moral 
quality behind the gift is to do wrong to the re- 
public. 

Of course all that I say of the orator applies 
with even greater force to the orator's latter-day 
and more influential brother, the journalist. The 
power of the journalist is great, but he is entitled 
neither to respect nor admiration because of that 
power unless it is used aright. He can do, and 
he often does, great good. He can do, and he 
often does, infinite mischief. All journalists, all 
writers, for the very reason that they appreciate 
the vast possibilities of their profession, should 
bear testimony against those who deeply discredit 
it. Offences against taste and morals, which are 
bad enough in a private citizen, are infinitely 
worse if made into instruments for debauching 
the community through a newspaper. Mendac- 
ity, slander, sensationalism, inanity, vapid trivial- 
ity, all are potent factors for the debauchery of 
the public mind and conscience. The excuse ad- 
vanced for vicious writing, that the public de- 
mands it and that the demand must be supplied, 
can no more be admitted than if it were advanced 
by the purveyors of food who sell poisonous adul- 
terations. 

In short, the good citizen in a republic must 



CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC 155 

realize that he ought to possess two sets of qual- 
ities, and that neither avails without the other. 
He must have those qualities which make for 
efficiency; and he must also have those qualities 
which direct the efficiency into channels for the 
public good. He is useless if he is inefficient. 
There is nothing to be done with, that type of 
citizen of whom all that can be said is that he is 
harmless. Virtue which is dependent upon a 
sluggish circulation is not impressive. There is 
little place in active life for the timid good man. 
The man who is saved by weakness from robust 
wickedness is likewise rendered immune from the 
robuster virtues. The good citizen in a republic 
must first of all be able to hold his own. He is 
no good citizen unless he has the ability which 
will make him work hard and which at need will 
make him fight hard. The good citizen is not a 
good citizen imless he is an efficient citizen. 

But if a man's efficiency is not guided and reg- 
ulated by a moral sense, then the more efficient 
he is the worse he is, the more dangerous to the 
body politic. Courage, intellect, all the master- 
ful qualities, serve but to make a man more evil 
if they are used merely for that man's own ad- 
vancement, with brutal indifference to the rights 
of others. It speaks ill for the community if the 
community worships these qualities and treats 
their possessors as heroes regardless of whether 



156 CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC 

the qualities are used rightly or wrongly. It 
makes no difference as to the precise way in which 
this sinister efficiency is shown. It makes no 
difference whether such a man's force and ability 
betray themselves in the career of money-maker 
or politician, soldier or orator, journalist or pop- 
ular leader. If the man works for evil, then the 
more successful he is the more he should be de- 
spised and condemned by all upright and far- 
seeing men. To judge a man merely by success 
is an abhorrent wrong; and if the people at large 
habitually so judge men, if they grow to con- 
done wickedness because the wicked man tri- 
umphs, they show their inability to imderstand 
that in the last analysis free institutions rest upon 
the character of citizenship, and that by such ad- 
miration of evil they prove themselves unfit for 
liberty. 

The homely virtues of the household, the or- 
dinary workaday virtues which make the woman 
a good housewife and housemother, which make 
the man a hard worker, a good husband and 
father, a good soldier at need, stand at the bottom 
of character. But of course many others must 
be added thereto if a state is to be not only free 
but great. Good citizenship is not good citizen- 
ship if exhibited only in the home. There remain 
the duties of the individual in relation to the 
state, and these duties are none too easy under 



CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC 157 

the conditions which exist where the effort is 
made to carry on free government in a complex, 
industrial civilization. Perhaps the most im- 
portant thing the ordinary citizen, and, above all, 
the leader of ordinary citizens, has to remember 
in political life is that he must not be a sheer 
doctrinaire. The closet philosopher, the refined 
and cultured individual who from his library tells 
how men ought to be governed under ideal con- 
ditions, is of no use in actual governmental work; 
and the one-sided fanatic, and still more the mob- 
leader, and the insincere man who to achieve 
power promises what by no possibility can be 
performed, are not merely useless but noxious. 

The citizen must have high ideals, and yet he 
must be able to achieve them in practical fashion. 
No permanent good comes from aspirations so 
lofty that they have grown fantastic and have 
become impossible and indeed undesirable to real- 
ize. The impracticable visionary is far less often 
the guide and precursor than he is the imbittered 
foe of the real reformer, of the man who, with 
stumblings and shortcomings, yet does in some 
shape, in practical fashion, give effect to the 
hopes and desires of those who strive for better 
things. Woe to the empty phrase-maker, to the 
empty idealist, who, instead of making ready the 
ground for the man of action, turns against him 
when he appears and hampers him as he does the 



158 CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC 

work! Moreover, the preacher of ideals must re- 
member how sorry and contemptible is the figure 
which he will cut, how great the damage that he 
will do, if he does not himself, in his own life, 
strive measurably to realize the ideals that he 
preaches for others. Let him remember also 
that the worth of the ideal must be largely de- 
termined by the success with which it can in 
practice be realized. We should abhor the so- 
called ''practical" men whose practicality as- 
sumes the shape of that peculiar baseness which 
finds its expression in disbelief in morality and 
decency, in disregard of high standards of living 
and conduct. Such a creature is the worst enemy 
of the body politic. But only less desirable as a 
citizen is his nominal opponent and real ally, the 
man of fantastic vision who makes the impossible 
better forever the enemy of the possible good. 

We can just as little afford to follow the doc- 
trinaires of an extreme individualism as the 
doctrinaires of an extreme socialism. Individual 
initiative, so far from being discouraged, should 
be stimulated ; and yet we should remember that, 
as society develops and grows more complex, we 
continually find that things which once it was 
desirable to leave to individual initiative can, 
under the changed conditions, be performed with 
better results by common effort. It is quite im- 
possible, and equally undesirable, to draw in 



CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC 159 

theory a hard-and-fast Hne which shall always 
divide the two sets of cases. This every one who 
is not cursed with the pride of the closet philos- 
opher will see, if he will only take the trouble to 
think about some of our commonest phenomena. 
For instance, when people live on isolated farms 
or in little hamlets, each house can be left to at- 
tend to its own drainage and water supply; but 
the mere multiplication of families in a given area 
produces new problems which, because they differ 
in size, are found to differ not only in degree but 
in kind from the old; and the questions of drain- 
age and water supply have to be considered from 
the common standpoint. It is not a matter for 
abstract dogmatizing to decide when this point 
is reached ; it is a matter to be tested by practical 
experiment. Much of the discussion about social- 
ism and individualism is entirely pointless, be- 
cause of failure to agree on terminology. It is 
not good to be the slave of names. I am a strong 
individualist by personal habit, inheritance, and 
conviction; but it is a mere matter of common 
sense to recognize that the state, the commimity, 
the citizens acting together, can do a number of 
things better than if they were left to individual 
action. The individualism which finds its ex- 
pression in the abuse of physical force is checked 
very early in the growth of civilization, and we 
of to-day should in our turn strive to shackle or 



i6o CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC 

destroy that individualism which triumphs by 
greed and cunning, which exploits the weak by 
craft instead of ruling them by brutality. We 
ought to go with any man in the effort to bring 
about justice and the equality of opportunity, to 
turn the tool-user more and more into the tool- 
owner, to shift burdens so that they can be more 
equitably borne. The deadening effect on any 
race of the adoption of a logical and extreme so- 
cialistic system could not be overstated; it would 
spell sheer destruction; it would produce grosser 
wrong and outrage, fouler immorality, than any 
existing system. But this does not mean that 
we may not with great advantage adopt certain 
of the principles professed by some given set of 
men who happen to call themselves Socialists; to 
be afraid to do so would be to make a mark of 
weakness on our part. 

But we should not take part in acting a lie any 
more than in telling a lie. We should not say 
that men are equal where they are not equal, nor 
proceed upon the assumption that there is an 
equality where it does not exist; but we should 
strive to bring about a measurable equality, at 
least to the extent of preventing the inequality 
which is due to force or fraud. Abraham Lin- 
coln, a man of the plain people, blood of their 
blood and bone of their bone, who all his life 
toiled and wrought and suffered for them, and at 



CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC i6i 

the end died for them, who always strove to rep- 
resent them, who would never tell an untruth to 
or for them, spoke of the doctrine of equality with 
his usual mixture of idealism and soimd common 
sense. He said (I omit what was of merely local 
significance) : 

**I think the authors of the Declaration of In- 
dependence intended to include all men, but that 
they did not mean to declare all men equal in all 
respects. They did not mean to say all men were 
equal in color, size, intellect, moral development, 
or social capacity. They defined with tolerable 
distinctness in what they did consider all men 
created equal — equal in certain inalienable rights, 
among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of 
happiness. This they said, and this they meant. 
They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth 
that all were then actually enjoying that equality, 
or yet that they were about to confer it immedi- 
ately upon them. They meant to set up a stand- 
ard maxim for free society which should be 
familiar to all — constantly looked to, constantly 
labored for, and, even though never perfectly at- 
tained, constantly approximated, and thereby con- 
stantly spreading and deepening its influence, and 
augmenting the happiness and value of life to all 
people, everywhere." 

We are bound in honor to refuse to listen to 
those men who would make us desist from the 



i62 CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC 

effort to do away with the inequahty which means 
injustice; the inequality of right, of opportunity, 
of privilege. We are bound in honor to strive to 
bring ever nearer the day when, as far as is hu- 
manly possible, we shall be able to realize the 
ideal that each man shall have an equal oppor- 
tunity to show the stuff that is in him by the 
way in which he renders service. There should, 
so far as possible, be equality of opportunity to 
render service; but just so long as there is in- 
equality of service there should and must be in- 
equality of reward. We may be sorry for the 
general, the painter, the artist, the worker in any 
profession or of any kind, whose misfortune rather 
than whose fault it is that he does his work ill. 
But the reward must go to the man who does his 
work well; for any other course is to create a 
new kind of privilege, the privilege of folly and 
weakness; and special privilege is injustice, what- 
ever form it takes. 

To say that the thriftless, the lazy, the vicious, 
the incapable, ought to have the reward given 
to those who are far-sighted, capable, and up- 
right, is to say what is not true and can not be 
true. Let us try to level up, but let us beware of 
the evil of levelling down. If a man stumbles, it 
is a good thing to help him to his feet. Every 
one of us needs a helping hand now and then. 
But if a man lies down, it is a waste of time to 



CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC 163 

try to carry him; and it is a very bad thing for 
every one if we make men feel that the same reward 
will come to those who shirk their work and to 
those who do it. 

Let us, then, take into account the actual facts 
of life, and not be misled into following any pro- 
posal for achieving the millennium, for re-creat- 
ing the golden age, until we have subjected it 
to hardheaded examination. On the other hand, 
it is foolish to reject a proposal merely because it 
is advanced by visionaries. If a given scheme is 
proposed, look at it on its merits, and, in consider- 
ing it, disregard formulas. It does not matter in 
the least who proposes it, or why. If it seems 
good, try it. If it proves good, accept it; other- 
wise reject it. There are plenty of men calling 
themselves Socialists with whom, up to a certain 
point, it is quite possible to work. If the next 
step is one which both we and they wish to take, 
why of course take it, without any regard to the 
fact that our views as to the tenth step may differ. 
But, on the other hand, keep clearly in mind that, 
though it has been worth while to take one step, 
this does not in the least mean that it may not be 
highly disadvantageous to take the next. It is 
just as foolish to refuse all progress because peo- 
ple demanding it desire at some points to go to 
absurd extremes, as it would be to go to these 
absurd extremes simply because some of the meas- 
ures advocated by the extremists were wise. 



i64 CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC 

The good citizen will demand liberty for him- 
self, and as a matter of pride he will see to it 
that others receive the liberty which he thus 
claims as his own. Probably the best test of 
true love of -liberty in any country is the way 
in which minorities are treated in that country. 
Not only should there be complete liberty in 
matters of religion and opinion, but complete 
liberty for each man to lead his life as he desires, 
provided only that in so doing he does not wrong 
his neighbor. Persecution is bad because it is 
persecution, and without reference to which side 
happens at the moment to be the persecutor and 
which the persecuted. Class hatred is bad in just 
the same way, and without any regard to the in- 
dividual who, at a given time, substitutes loyalty 
to a class for loyalty to the nation, or substitutes 
hatred of men because they happen to come in a 
certain social category, for judgment awarded 
them according to their conduct. Remember al- 
ways that the same measure of condemnation 
should be extended to the arrogance which would 
look down upon or crush any man because he is 
poor and to the envy and hatred which would 
destroy a man because he is wealthy. The over- 
bearing brutality of the man of wealth or power, 
and the envious and hateful malice directed 
against wealth or power, are really at root merely 
different manifestations of the same quality, 
merely the two sides of the same shield. The 



CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC 165 

man who, if bom to wealth and power, exploits 
and ruins his less fortunate brethren is at heart 
the same as the greedy and violent demagogue 
who excites those who have not property to 
plunder those who have. The gravest wrong upon 
his country is inflicted by that man, whatever his 
station, who seeks to make his countrymen divide 
primarily on the line that separates class from 
class, occupation from occupation, men of more 
wealth from men of less wealth, instead of re- 
membering that the only safe standard is that 
which judges each man on his worth as a man, 
whether he be rich or poor, without regard to 
his profession or to his station in life. Such is 
the only true democratic test, the only test that 
can with propriety be applied in a republic. There 
have been many republics in the past, both in 
what we call antiquity and in what we call the 
Middle Ages. They fell, and the prime factor in 
their fall was the fact that the parties tended to 
divide along the line that separates wealth from 
poverty. It made no difference which side was 
successful; it made no difference whether the re- 
public fell under the rule of an oligarchy or the 
rule of a mob. In either case, when once loyalty 
to a class had been substituted for loyalty to the 
republic, the end of the republic was at hand. 
There is no greater need to-day than the need to 
keep ever in mind the fact that the cleavage be- 



i66 CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC 

tween right and wrong, between good citizenship 
and bad citizenship, runs at right angles to, and 
not parallel with, the lines of cleavage between 
class and class, between occupation and occupa- 
tion. Ruin looks us in the face if we judge a 
man by his position instead of judging him by his 
conduct in that position. 

In a republic, to be successful we must learn 
to combine intensity of conviction with a broad 
tolerance of difference of conviction. Wide differ- 
ences of opinion in matters of religious, political, 
and social belief must exist if conscience and in- 
tellect alike are not to be stimted, if there is to 
be room for healthy growth. Bitter internecine 
hatreds, based on such differences, are signs, not 
of earnestness of belief, but of that fanaticism 
which, whether religious or anti-religious, demo- 
cratic or anti-democratic, is itself but a manifes- 
tation of the gloomy bigotry which has been the 
chief factor in the downfall of so many, many 
nations. 

Of one man in especial, beyond any one else, 
the citizens of a republic should beware, and 
that is of the man who appeals to them to sup- 
port him on the ground that he is hostile to other 
citizens of the republic, that he will secure for 
those who elect him, in one shape or another, 
profit at the expense of other citizens of the re- 
public. It makes no difference whether he ap- 



CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC 167 

peals to class hatred or class interest, to religious 
or antireligious prejudice. The man who makes 
such an appeal should always be presumed to 
make it for the sake of furthering his own inter- 
est. The very last thing that an intelligent and 
self-respecting member of a democratic commu- 
nity should do is to reward any public man because 
that public man says he will get the private 
citizen something to which this private citizen is 
not entitled, or will gratify some emotion or ani- 
mosity which this private citizen ought not to 
possess. Let me illustrate this by one anecdote 
from my own experience. A number of years ago 
I was engaged in cattle-ranching on the great 
plains of the western United States. There were 
no fences. The cattle wandered free, the owner- 
ship of each being determined by the brand; the 
calves were branded with the brand of the cows 
they followed. If on the round-up an animal was 
passed by, the following year it would appear as 
an unbranded yearling, and was then called a 
maverick. By the custom of the country these 
mavericks were branded with the brand of the 
man on whose range they were found. One day 
I was riding the range with a newly hired cow- 
boy, and we came upon a maverick. We roped 
and threw it; then we built a little fire, took out 
a cinch-ring, heated it at the fire; and the cow- 
boy started to put on the brand. I said to him, 



i68 CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC 

"It is So-and-so's brand," naming the man on 
whose range we happened to be. He answered: 
"That's all right, boss; I know my business." 
In another moment I said to him: "Hold on, you 
are putting on my brand!" To which he an- 
swered: "That's all right; I always put on the 
boss's brand." I answered: "Oh, very well. 
Now you go straight back to the' ranch and 
get what is owing to you; I don't need you any 
longer." He jumped up and said: "Why, what's 
the matter? I was putting on your brand." And 
I answered: "Yes, my friend, and if you will 
steal for me you will steal from me." 

Now, the same principle which applies in pri- 
vate life applies also in public life. If a public 
man tries to get your vote by saying that he will 
do something wrong in your interest, you can be 
absolutely certain that if ever it becomes worth 
his while he will do something wrong against your 
interest. 

So much for the citizenship of the individual 
in his relations to his family, to his neighbor, to 
the state. There remain duties of citizenship 
which the state, the aggregation of all the indi- 
viduals, owes in connection with other states, 
with other nations. Let me say at once that I 
am no advocate of a foolish cosmopolitanism. I 
believe that a man must be a good patriot before 
he can be, and as the only possible way of being, a 



CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC 169 

good citizen of the world. Experience teaches us 
that the average man who protests that his inter- 
national feeling swamps his national feeling, that 
he does not care for his country because he cares 
so much for mankind, in actual practice proves 
himself the foe of mankind; that the man who 
says that he does not care to be a citizen of any 
one cotmtry, because he is a citizen of the world, 
is in very fact usually an exceedingly undesirable 
citizen of whatever comer of the world he hap- 
pens at the moment to be in. In the dim future 
all moral needs and moral standards may change ; 
but at present, if a man can view his own coun- 
try and all other countries from the same level 
with tepid indifference, it is wise to distrust him, 
just as it is wise to distrust the man who can 
take the same dispassionate view of his wife and 
his mother. However broad and deep a man's 
sympathies, however intense his activities, he 
need have no fear that they will be cramped by 
love of his native land. 

Now, this does not mean in the least that a 
man should not wish to do good outside of his 
native land. On the contrary, just as I think 
that the man who loves his family is more apt to 
be a good neighbor than the man who does not, 
so I think that the most useful member of the 
family of nations is normally a strongly patriotic 
nation. So far from patriotism being incon- 



I70 CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC 

sistent with a proper regard for the rights of 
other nations, I hold that the true patriot, who is 
as jealous of the national honor as a gentleman is 
of his own honor, will be careful to see that the 
nation neither inflicts nor suffers wrong, just as a 
gentleman scorns equally to wrong others or to 
suffer others to wrong him. I do not for one 
moment admit that political morality is different 
from private morality, that a promise made on 
the stump differs from a promise made in private 
life. I do not for one moment admit that a man 
should act deceitfully as a public servant in his 
dealings with other nations, any more than that 
he should act deceitfully in his dealings as a pri- 
vate citizen with other private citizens. I do 
not for one moment admit that a nation should 
treat other nations in a different spirit from 
that in which an honorable man wotdd treat 
other men. 

In practically applying this principle to the two 
sets of cases there is, of course, a great practical 
difference to be taken into account. We speak 
of international law; but international law is 
something wholly different from private or mu- 
nicipal law, and the capital difference is that there 
is a sanction for the one and no sanction for the 
other; that there is an outside force which com- 
pels individuals to obey the one, while there is 
no such outside force to compel obedience as re- 



CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC 171 

gards the other. International law will, I believe, 
as the generations pass, grow stronger and stronger 
until in some way or other there develops the 
power to make it respected. But as yet it is only 
in the first formative period. As yet, as a rule, 
each nation is of necessity obliged to judge for 
itself in matters of vital importance between it 
and its neighbors, and actions must of necessity, 
where this is the case, be different from what 
they are where, as among private citizens, there 
is an outside force whose action is all-powerful 
and must be invoked in any crisis of importance. 
It is the duty of wise statesmen, gifted with the 
power of looking ahead, to try to encourage and 
build up every movement which will substitute 
or tend to substitute some other agency for force 
in the settlement of international disputes. It is 
the duty of every honest statesman to try to 
guide the nation so that it shall not wrong any 
other nation. But as yet the great civilized peo- 
ples, if they are to be true to themselves and to 
the cause of htmianity and civilization, must keep 
ever in mind that in the last resort they must 
possess both the will and the power to resent 
wrong-doing from others. The men who sanely 
believe in a lofty morality preach righteousness; 
but they do not preach weakness, whether among 
private citizens or among nations. We believe 
that our ideals should be high, but not so high as 



172 CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC 

to make it impossible measurably to realize them. 
We sincerely and earnestly believe in peace; but 
if peace and justice conflict, we scorn the man 
who would not stand for justice though the whole 
world came in arms against him. 

And now, my hosts, a word in parting. You 
and I belong to the only two republics among the 
great powers of the world. The ancient friend- 
ship between France and the United States has 
been, on the whole, a sincere and disinterested 
friendship. A calamity to you would be a sor- 
row to us. But it would be more than that. In 
the seething turmoil of the history of humanity 
certain nations stand out as possessing a peculiar 
power or charm, some special gift of beauty or 
wisdom or strength, which puts them among the 
immortals, which makes them rank forever with 
the leaders of mankind. France is one of these 
nations. For her to sink would be a loss to all 
the world. There are certain lessons of bril- 
liance and of generous gallantry that she can teach 
better than any of her sister nations. When the 
French peasantry sang of Malbrook, it was to tell 
how the soul of this warrior-foe took flight up- 
ward through the laurels he had won. Nearly 
seven centuries ago, Froissart, writing of a time 
of dire disaster, said that the realm of France was 
never so stricken that there were not left men who 
would valiantly fight for it. You have had a 



CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC 173 

great past. I believe that you will have a great 
future. Long may you carry yourselves proudly 
as citizens of a nation which bears a leading part 
in the teaching and uplifting of mankind. 



THE THRALDOM OF NAMES 



THE THRALDOM OF NAMES 

IT behooves our people never to fall under 
the thraldom of names, and least of all to 
be misled by designing people who appeal to 
the reverence for, or antipathy toward, a given 
name in order to achieve some alien purpose. 
Of course such misuse of names is as old as the 
history of what we understand when we speak of 
civilized mankind. The rule of a mob may be 
every whit as tyrannical and oppressive as the 
rule of a single individual, whether or not called 
a dictator; and the rule of an oligarchy, whether 
this oligarchy is a plutocracy or a bureaucracy, 
or any other small set of powerful men, may in 
its turn be just as sordid and just as bloodthirsty 
as that of a mob. But the apologists for the mob 
or oligarchy or dictator, in justifying the tyranny, 
use different words. The mob leaders usually 
state that all that they are doing is necessary in 
order to advance the cause of ''liberty,'* while the 
dictator and the oligarchy are usually defended 
upon the ground that the course they follow is 
absolutely necessary so as to secure ''order." 

177 



178 THE THRALDOM OF NAMES 

Many excellent people are taken in by the use of 
the word "liberty" at the one time, and the use 
of the word ''order" at the other, and ignore the 
simple fact that despotism is despotism, tyranny 
tyranny, oppression oppression, whether com- 
mitted by one individual or by many individuals, 
by a state or by a private corporation. 

Moreover, tyranny exercised on behalf of one 
set of people is very apt in the long run to damage 
especially the representatives of that very class 
by the violence of the reaction which it invites. 
The course of the second republic in France was 
such, with its mobs, its bloody civil tumults, its 
national workshops, its bitter factional divisions, 
as to invite and indeed insure its overthrow and 
the establishment of a dictatorship; while it is 
needless to mention the innumerable instances in 
which the name of order has been invoked to 
sanction tyranny, imtil there has finally come a 
reaction so violent that both the tyranny and 
all public order have disappeared together. The 
second empire in France led straight up to the 
Paris Commrme; and nothing so well shows how 
far the French people had advanced in fitness 
for self-government as the fact that the hideous 
atrocities of the Commune, which rendered it 
imperative that it should be rigorously repressed, 
nevertheless did not produce another violent re- 
action, but left the French republic standing, 



THE THRALDOM OF NAMES 179 

and the French people as resolute in their refusal 
to be ruled by a king as by a mob. 

Of course when a great crisis actually comes, 
no matter how much people may have been mis- 
led by names, they promptly awaken to their un- 
importance. To the individual who suffered under 
the guillotine at Paris, or in the drownings in the 
Loire, or to the individual who a century before 
was expelled from his beloved country, or tor- 
tured, or sent to the galleys, it made no differ- 
ence whatever that one set of acts was performed 
under Robespierre and Danton and Marat in the 
name of liberty and reason and the rights of 
the people, or that the other was performed in the 
name of order and authority and religion by the 
direction of the great monarch. Tyranny and 
cruelty were tyranny and cruelty just as much 
in one case as in the other, and just as much when 
those guilty of them used one shibboleth as when 
they used another. All forms of tyranny and 
cruelty must alike be condemned by honest men. 

We in this coimtry have been very fortunate. 
Thanks to the teaching and the practice of the 
men whom we most revere as leaders, of the men 
like Washington and Lincoln, we have hitherto 
escaped the twin gulfs of despotism and mob rule, 
and we have never been in any danger from the 
worst forms of religious bitterness. But we should 
therefore be all the more careful, as we deal with 



i8o THE THRALDOM OF NAMES 

our industrial and social problems, not to fall 
into mistakes similar to those which have brought 
lasting disaster on less fortunately situated peo- 
ples. We have achieved democracy in politics 
just because we have been able to steer a middle 
course between the rule of the mob and the rule 
of the dictator. We shall achieve industrial de- 
mocracy because we shall steer a similar middle 
course between the extreme individualist and the 
Socialist, between the demagogue who attacks all 
wealth and who can see no wrong done anywhere 
unless it is perpetrated by a man of wealth, and 
the apologist for the plutocracy who rails against 
so much as a restatement of the eighth command- 
ment upon the ground that it will "hurt busi- 
ness." 

First and foremost, we must stand firmly on a 
basis of good sound ethics. We intend to do what 
is right for the ample and sufficient reason that it 
is right. If business is hurt by the stem exposure 
of crookedness and the result of efforts to punish 
the crooked man, then business must be hurt, 
even though good men are involved in the hurt- 
ing, until it so adjusts itself that it is possible 
to prosecute wrong-doing without stampeding the 
business community into a terror-struck defence 
of the wrong-doers and an angry assault upon 
those who have exposed them. On the other hand, 
we must beware, above all things, of being mis- 



THE THRALDOM OF NAMES i8i 

led by wicked or foolish men who wotdd condone 
homicide and violence, and apologize for the dy- 
namiter and the assassin because, forsooth, they 
choose to take the ground that crime is no crime 
if the wicked man happens also to have been a 
shiftless and unthrifty or lazy man who has never 
amassed property. It is essential that we should 
wrest the control of the government out of the 
hands of rich men who use it for unhealthy pur- 
poses, and should keep it out of their hands; and 
to this end the first requisite is to provide means 
adequately to deal with corporations, which are 
essential to modern business, but which, under 
the decisions of the courts, and because of the 
short-sightedness of the public, have become the 
chief factors in political and business debasement. 
But it would be just as bad to put the control of 
the government into the hands of demagogues 
and visionaries who seek to pander to ignorance 
and prejudice by penalizing thrift and business 
enterprise, and ruining all men of means, with, as 
an attendant result, the ruin of the entire com- 
munity. The tyranny of politicians with a bureau- 
cracy behind them and a mass of ignorant peo- 
ple supporting them would be just as insufferable 
as the tyranny of big corporations. The tyranny 
would be the same in each case, and it would make 
no more difference that one was called individual- 
ism and the other collectivism than it made in 



1 82 THE THRALDOM OF NAMES 

French history whether tyranny was exercised in 
the name of the Commune or of the Emperor, of 
a committee of national safety, or of a king. 

The sinister and adroit reactionary, the sinister 
and violent radical, are alike in this, that each 
works in the end for the destruction of the cause 
that he professedly champions. If the one is left 
to his own devices he will make such an exhibition 
of brutal and selfish greed as to utterly discredit 
the entire system of government by individual 
initiative ; and if the other is allowed to work his 
will he, in his turn, will make men so loathe 
interference and control by the state that any 
abuses connected with the untrammelled control 
of all business by private individuals will seem 
small by comparison. We can not afford to be em- 
pirical. We must judge each case on its mer- 
its. It is absolutely indispensable to foster the 
spirit of individual initiative, of self-reliance, of 
self-help; but this does not mean that we are to 
refuse to face facts and to recognize that the 
growth of our complex civilization necessitates an 
increase in the exercise of the functions of the 
state. It has been shown beyond power of ref- 
utation that unrestricted individualism, for in- 
stance, means the destruction of our forests and 
our water supply. The dogma of ' ' individualism ' ' 
can not be permitted to interfere with the duty of 
a great city to see that householders, small as well 



THE THRALDOM OF NAMES 183 

as big, live in decent and healthy buildings, drink 
good water, and have the streets adequately lighted 
and kept clean. Individual initiative, the reign 
of individualism, may be crushed out just as ef- 
fectively by the imchecked growth of private 
monopoly, if the state does not interfere at all, as 
it would be crushed out under communism, or as 
it would disappear, together with everything else 
that makes life worth living, if we adopted the 
tenets of the extreme Socialists. 

In 1896 the party of discontent met with a 
smashing defeat for the very reason that, to- 
gether with legitimate attacks on real abuses, 
they combined wholly illegitimate advocacy even 
of the methods of dealing with these real abuses, 
and in addition stood for abuses of their own 
which, in far-reaching damage, would have cast 
quite into the shade the effects of the abuses 
against which they warred. It was essential both 
to the material and moral progress of the country 
that these forces should be beaten; and beaten 
they were, overwhelmingly. But the genuine eth- 
ical revolt against these forces was aided by a 
very ugly materialism, and this materialism at one 
time claimed the victory as exclusively its own, 
and advanced it as a warrant and license for the 
refusal to interfere with any misdeeds on the part 
of men of wealth. What such an attitude meant 
was set forth as early as 1896 by an English 



i84 THE THRALDOM OF NAMES 

visitor, the journalist Steevens, a man of marked 
insight. Mr. Steevens did not see with entire 
clearness of vision into the complex American 
character; it would have been marvellous if a 
stranger of his slight experience here could so have 
seen; but it would be difficult to put certain im- 
portant facts more clearly than he put them. Im- 
mediately after the election he wrote as follows 
(I condense slightly) : 

"In the United States legal organization of in- 
dustry has been left wholly wanting. Little is 
done by the state. All is left to the initiative of 
the individual. The apparent negligence is ex- 
plained partly by the American horror of retard- 
ing mechanical progress, and partly by their re- 
liance on competition. They have cast overboard 
the law as the safeguard of individual rights, and 
have put themselves under the protection of com- 
petition, and of it alone. Now a trust in its ex- 
acter acceptation is the flat negation of competi- 
tion. It is certain that commercial concerns make 
frequent, powerful, and successful combinations 
to override the public interest. All such corpora- 
tions are left imfettered in a way that to an Eng- 
lishman appears almost a return to savagery. 
The defencelessness of individual liberty against 
the encroachment of the railway companies, tram- 
way companies, nuisance-committing manure com- 
panies, and the like, is little less than horrible. 



THE THRALDOM OF NAMES 185 

Where regulating acts are proposed, the companies 
unite to oppose them ; where such acts exist, they 
bribe corrupt officials to ignore them. When they 
want any act for themselves, it can always be 
bought for cash. [This is of course a gross ex- 
aggeration; and allusion should have been made 
to the violent and demagogic attacks upon cor- 
porations, which are even more common than and 
are quite as noxious as acts of oppression by cor- 
porations.] They maintain their own members 
in the legislative bodies — pocket assemblymen, 
pocket representatives, pocket senators. In the 
name of individual freedom and industrial prog- 
ress they have become the tyrants of the whole 
commimity. Lawless greed on one side and law- 
less brutality on the other — the outlook frowns. 
On the wisdom of the rulers of the coimtry in 
salving or imbittering these antagonisms — still 
more, on the fortune of the people in either mod- 
ifying or hardening their present conviction that 
to get dollars is the one end of life — it depends 
whether the future of the United States is to be 
of eminent beneficence or imspeakable disaster. 
It may stretch out the light of hberty to the 
whole world. It may become the devil's drill- 
ground where the cohorts of anarchy will furnish 
themselves against the social iVrmageddon." 

Mr. Steevens here clearly points out, what 
every one ought to recognize, that if individual- 



1 86 THE THRALDOM OF NAMES 

ism is left absolutely uncontrolled as a modem 
business condition the curious result will follow 
that all power of individual achievement and in- 
dividual effort in the average man will be crushed 
out just as effectively as if the state took absolute 
control of everything. It would be easy to name 
several big corporations each one of which has 
within its sphere crushed out all competition so 
as to make, not only its rivals, but its customers 
as dependent upon it as if the government had 
assumed complete charge of the product. It 
would, in my judgment, be a very unhealthy 
thing for the government thus to assume complete 
charge; but it is even more unhealthy to permit 
a private monopoly thus to assume it. The sim- 
ple truth is that the defenders of the theory of 
luiregulated lawlessness in the business world are 
either insincere or blind to the facts when they 
speak of their system as permitting a healthy 
individualism and individual initiative. On the 
contrary, it crushes out individualism, save in a 
very few able and powerful men who tend to 
become dictators in the business world precisely 
as in the old days a Spanish-American president 
tended to become a dictator in the political world. 
Moreover, where there is absolute lawlessness, 
absolute failure by the state to control or super- 
vise these great corporations, the inevitable re- 
siilt is to favor, among these very able men of 



THE THRALDOM OF NAMES 187 

business, the man who is unscrupulous and cun- 
ning. The unscrupulous big man who gets com- 
plete control of a given forest tract, or of a net- 
work of railways which alone give access to a 
certain region, or who, in combination with his 
fellows, acquires control of a certain industry, may 
crush out in the great mass of citizens affected 
all individual initiative quite as much as it would 
be crushed out by state control. The very reason 
why we object to state ownership, that it puts a 
stop to individual initiative and to the healthy 
development of personal responsibility, is the 
reason why we object to an unsupervised, vm.- 
checked monopolistic control in private hands. 
We urge control and supervision by the nation 
as an antidote to the movement for state social- 
ism. Those who advocate total lack of regulation, 
those who advocate lawlessness in the business 
world, themselves give the strongest impulse to 
what I believe would be the deadening movement 
toward imadulterated state socialism.. 

There must be law to control the big men, and 
therefore especially the big corporations, in the 
industrial world in the interest of our industrial 
democracy of to-day. This law must be efficient, 
and therefore it must be administered by execu- 
tive officers and not by lawsuits in the courts. 
If this is not done the agitation to increase out 
of all measiire the share of the government in 



1 88 THE THRALDOM OF NAMES 

this work will receive an enormous impetus. The 
movement for government control of the great 
business corporations is no more a movement 
against liberty than a movement to put a stop 
to violence is a movement against liberty. On 
the contrary, in each case alike it is a movement 
for liberty ; in the one case a movement on behalf 
of the hard-working man of small means, just as 
in the other case it is a movement on behalf of 
the peaceable citizen who does not wish a ''lib- 
erty" which puts him at the mercy of any rowdy 
who is stronger than he is. The huge, irrespon- 
sible corporation which demands liberty from the 
supervision of government agents stands on the 
same ground as the less dangerous criminal of the 
streets who wishes liberty from police interference. 
But there is an even more important lesson for 
us Americans to learn, and this also is touched 
upon in what I have quoted above. It is not 
true, as Mr. Steevens says, that Americans feel 
that the one end of life is to get dollars; but the 
statement contains a very unpleasant element of 
truth. The hard materialism of greed is just as 
objectionable as the hard materialism of brutal- 
ity, and the greed of the ''haves" is just as ob- 
jectionable as the greed of the "have-nots," and 
no more so. The envious and sinister creature 
who declaims against a great corporation because 
he really desires himself to enjoy what in hard. 



THE THRALDOM OF NAMES 189 

selfish, brutal fashion the head of that great cor- 
poration enjoys, offers a spectacle which is both 
sad and repellent. The brutal arrogance and 
grasping greed of the one man are in reality the 
same thing as the bitter envy and hatred and 
grasping greed of the other. That kind of ' * have ' ' 
and that kind of ''have-not" stand on the same 
eminence of infamy. It is as important for the 
one as for the other to learn the lesson of the true 
relations of life. Of course, the first duty of any 
man is to pay his own way, to be able to earn his 
own livelihood, to support himself and his wife 
and his children and those dependent upon him. 
He must be able to give those for whom it is his 
duty to care food and clothing, shelter, medicine, 
an education, a legitimate chance for reasonable 
and healthy amusements, and the opportunity to 
acquire the knowledge and power which will fit 
them in their turn to do good work in the world. 
When once a man has reached this point, which, 
of course, will vary greatly under different con- 
ditions, then he has reached the point where 
other things become immensely more important 
than adding to his wealth. It is emphatically 
right, indeed, I am tempted to say, it is emphatic- 
ally the first duty of each American, "to get 
dollars," as Mr. Steevens contemptuously phrased 
it; for this is only another way of saying that it 
is his first duty to earn his own living. But it 



190 



THE THRALDOM OF NAMES 



is not his only duty, by a great deal; and after 
the living has been earned getting dollars should 
come far behind many other duties. 

Yet another thing. No movement ever has 
done or ever will do good in this country, where as- 
sault is made, not upon evil wherever found, but 
simply upon evil as it happens to be found in a 
particular class. The big newspaper, owned or 
controlled in Wall Street, which is everlastingly 
preaching about the iniquity of laboring men, 
which is quite willing to hound politicians for 
their misdeeds, but which with raving fury de- 
fends all the malefactors of great wealth, stands 
on an exact level with, and neither above nor be- 
low, that other newspaper whose whole attack is 
upon men of wealth, which declines to condemn, 
or else condemns in apologetic, perfunctory, and 
wholly inefficient manner, outrages committed by 
labor. This is the kind of paper which by tor- 
rents of foul abuse seeks to stir up a bitter class 
hatred against every man of means simply be- 
cause he is a man of means, against every man of 
wealth, whether he is an honest man who by in- 
dustry and ability has honorably won his wealth, 
and who honorably spends it, or a man whose 
wealth represents robbery and whose life repre- 
sents either profligacy or at best an inane, useless, 
and tasteless extravagance. This country can not 
afford to let its conscience grow warped and 



THE THRALDOM OF NAMES 191 

twisted, as it must grow if it takes either one of 
these two positions. We must draw the line, not 
on wealth nor on poverty, but on conduct. We 
must stand for the good citizen because he is a 
good citizen, whether he be rich or whether he 
be poor, and we must mercilessly attack the man 
who does evil, wholly without regard to whether 
the evil is done in high or low places, whether it 
takes the form of homicidal violence among mem- 
bers of a federation of miners, or of imscrupulous 
craft and greed in the head of some great Wall 
Street corporation. 

The best lesson that any people can learn is 
that there is no patent cure-all which will make 
the body politic perfect, and that any man who 
is able glibly to answer every question as to how 
to deal with the evils of the body politic is at best 
a foolish visionary and at worst an evil-minded 
quack. Neither doctrinaire socialism nor unre- 
stricted individualism nor any other ism will 
bring about the millennium. Collectivism and 
individualism must be used as supplementary, not 
as antagonistic, philosophies. In the last anal- 
ysis the welfare of a nation depends on its having 
throughout a healthy development. A healthy 
social system must of necessity represent the sum 
of very many moral, intellectual, and economic 
forces, and each such force must depend in its 



192 THE THRALDOM OF NAMES 

turn partly upon the whole system; and all these 
many forces are needed to develop a high grade 
of character in the individual men and women who 
make up the nation. No individual man could 
be kept healthy by living in accordance with a 
plan which took cognizance only of one set of 
muscles or set of organs; his health must depend 
upon his general bodily vigor, that is, upon the 
general care which affects hundreds of different 
organs according to their himdreds of needs. So- 
ciety is, of course, infinitely more complex than 
the human body. The influences that tell upon 
it are countless; they are closely interwoven, 
interdependent, and each is acted upon by many 
others. It is pathetically absurd, when such are 
the conditions, to believe that some one simple 
panacea for all evils can be found. Slowly, with 
infinite difficulty, with bitter disappointments, 
with stumblings and baitings, we are working our 
way upward and onward. In this progress some- 
thing can be done by continually striving to im- 
prove the social system, now here, now there. 
Something more can be done by the resolute 
effort for a many-sided higher life. This life must 
largely come to each individual from within, by 
his own effort, but toward the attainment of it 
each of us can help many others. Such a life 
must represent the struggle for a higher and 
broader humanity, to be shown not merely in the 



THE THRALDOM OF NAMES 193 

dealings of each of us within the realm of the 
state, but even more by the dealings of each of 
us in the more intimate realm of the family; for 
the life of the state rests and must ever rest upon 
the life of the family. 

In one of Lowell's biting satires he holds up to 
special scorn the smug, conscienceless creature 
who refuses to consider the morality of any ques- 
tion of social ethics by remarking that "they 
didn't know everything down in Judee." It is 
to be wished that some of those who preach and 
practise a gospel of mere materialism and greed, 
and who speak as if the heaping up of wealth by 
the community or by the individual were in itself 
the be-all and end-all of life, would learn from the 
most widely read and oldest of books that true 
wisdom which teaches that it is well to have 
neither great poverty nor great riches. Worst of 
all is it to have great poverty and great riches side 
by side in constant contrast. Nevertheless, even 
this contrast can be accepted if men are convinced 
that the riches are accumulated as the result of 
great service rendered to the people as a whole, 
and if their use is regulated in the interest of the 
whole community. 

The movement for social and industrial reform 
has for two of its prime objects the prevention of 
the accumulation of wealth save by honest serv- 
ice to the country, and the supervision and regu- 



194 THE THRALDOM OF NAMES 

lation of its business use, and the determination 
of how it shall be taxed, and on what terms in- 
herited, even when acquired and used honestly. 
This movement is a healthy movement. It aims 
to replace sullen discontent, restless pessimism, 
and evil preparation for revolution, by an aggres- 
sive, healthy determination to get to the bottom 
of our troubles and remedy them. To halt in 
the movement, as those blinded men wish who 
care only for the immediate rehef from all ob- 
stacles which would thwart their getting what 
is not theirs, would work wide-reaching damage. 
Such a halt would turn away the energies of the 
energetic and forceful men who desire to reform 
matters from a legitimate object into the chan- 
nel of bitter and destructive agitation. 



PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP 



PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP' 

WHAT counts in a man or in a nation is 
not what the man or the nation can do, 
but what he or it actually does. Schol- 
arship that consists in mere learning, but finds no 
expression in production, may be of interest and 
value to the individual, just as ability to shoot 
well at clay pigeons may be of interest and value 
to him, but it ranks no higher unless it finds ex- 
pression in achievement. From the standpoint 
of the nation, and from the broader standpoint of 
mankind, scholarship is of worth chiefly when it 
is productive, when the scholar not merely re- 
ceives or acquires, but gives. 

Of course there is much production by scholarly 
men which is not, strictly speaking, scholarship; 
any more than the men themselves, despite their 
scholarly tastes and attributes, would claim to be 
scholars in the technical or purely erudite sense. 
The exceedingly valuable and extensive work of 
Edward Cope comes under the head of science, 
and represents original investigation and orig- 
inal thought concerning what that investigation 

^"The Mediaeval Mind." By Henry Osbom Taylor. 
"The Life and Times of Cavour." By William Roscoe Thayer. 

197 



198 PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP 

showed ; yet if the word scholarship is used broadly, 
his work must certainly be called productive sci- 
entific scholarship. General Alexander's capital 
''Memoirs of a Confederate" show that a man 
who is a first-class citizen as well as a first-class 
fighting man may also combine the true scholar's 
power of research and passion for truth with the 
ability to see clearly and to state clearly what he 
has seen. Mr. Hannis Taylor's history of "The 
Origin and Growth of the American Constitu- 
tion" and General Francis V. Greene's history of 
the American Revolution could have been written 
only by scholars. Such altogether delightful vol- 
umes of essays as Mr. Crothers's "Gentle Reader," 
"Pardoner's Wallet," and ''Among Friends" may 
not, in the strictest sense of the word, represent 
scholarship any more than the "Essays of Elia" 
represent scholarship; but they represent more 
than scholarship, and they could have been 
written only by a man of scholarly attributes. 
The same thing is true of Mr. Maurice Egan, now 
our Minister to Denmark — who so well upholds 
the tradition which has always identified American 
men of letters with American diplomacy — in his 
essays in Comparative Literature, named, as I 
think not altogether happily, from the first essay, 
"The Ghost in Hamlet." Mr. Egan writes not 
merely with charm but as no one but a man of 
scholarly attributes could write — and, by the way. 



PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP 199 

his dedication to Archbishop John Lancaster 
Spalding is a dedication to a man whose lofty 
spiritual teachings have been expressed in sin- 
gulariy beautiful English. In its most perfect 
expression scholarship must utter itself with liter- 
ary charm and distinction; although, I am sorry 
to say, the professional scholars sometimes actually 
distrust scholarship which is able thus to bring 
forth wisdom divorced from pedantry and dry- 
ness. As an example, Gilbert Murray's ''Rise of 
the Greek Epic" not only shows profound schol- 
arship and the profound scholarly instinct which 
can alone profit by the mere erudition of scholar- 
ship, but is also so delightfully written as to be 
as interesting as the most interesting novel; and, 
curiously enough, this very fact, coupled with the 
fact that Mr. Murray's translations of Euripides 
and Aristophanes are so attractive, has tended to 
excite distrust of him in the minds of worthy 
scholars whose productions are themselves free 
from all taint of interest, from all taint of liter- 
ary charm. Professor Lounsbury's extraordinary 
scholarship has been fully appreciated only by the 
best scholars; and this partly because of the very 
fact of his many-sided development in the field of 
intellectual endeavor. 

But I speak now of works of scholarship in the 
more conventional sense, of works which show 
scholarship such as Lea showed in his history of 



200 PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP 

the Inquisition, such as Child showed in his 
studies of English ballad poetry. 

Mr. Taylor's study of "The Mediaeval Mind" 
is a noteworthy contribution — I am tempted to 
say the most noteworthy of recent contributions 
— to the best kind of productive scholarship. His 
erudition is extraordinary in breadth and depth, 
his grasp of the subject no less marked than his 
power of conveying to others what he has thus 
grasped. He is not only faithful to the truth in 
large things, he is accurate in small matters also; 
and where he makes use of any statement he al- 
ways shows that there is justification for it; al- 
though, by the way, I can only guess at his reason 
for calling Attila a ''Turanian" — a word which 
carries a pleasant flavor of pre- Victorian ethnol- 
ogy, and might just about as appropriately be 
applied to Tecumseh. As he expressly states, 
Mr. Taylor is not concerned with the brutalities 
of medieval life, nor with the lower grades of 
ignorance and superstition which abounded in the 
Middle Ages, but with the more informed and 
constructive spirit of the mediaeval time. There 
is, of course, no hard and sharp line to be drawn 
between mediaeval time and, on the one hand, 
what is ''ancient" and, on the other hand, what 
is "modem"; but for his purposes he treats the 
twelfth and thirteenth centuries as showing the 
culmination of the mediaeval spirit in its most 



PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP 201 

characteristic form; although he also incidentally 
touches on things that occurred in the fourteenth 
century, and of course covers the slow upward 
movement through the Dark Ages (as to which 
he does rather less than justice to the Caro- 
lingian revival of learning), when men were gro- 
ping in the black abyss into which civilization so 
rapidly slid after the close of the second century. 
His mastery of the facts is well-nigh perfect, and 
he handles them with singular sympathy. In 
such chapters as ''The Spotted Actuality" he 
makes it evident that he has constantly before 
his own mind the whole picture. The ordinary 
reader, however, needs to remember that it is 
no part of Mr. Taylor's purpose to present this 
whole picture, but merely to make a study some- 
what analogous to what a study of the intellect 
of the nineteenth century would be if it dealt ex- 
clusively with the thought of the various univer- 
sities of Europe and America and of circles like 
that of Emerson at Concord and Goethe at Wei- 
mar. Indeed, this comparison is hardly accurate, 
for the universities of the nineteenth century had 
a far closer connection with the living thought 
of the day than was true of the universities of the 
twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The latter (like 
their feeble survivals in the Spanish-speaking 
countries) much more closely resembled the ordi- 
nary type of Mohammedan university of the pres- 



202 PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP 

ent day, such a university as the big Mohammedan 
university at Cairo, than they resembled any 
modem university worth caUing such, or, indeed, 
any ancient university of Hving and creative force. 
The schoolmen of the Middle Ages and the 
universities in which they flourished are well 
worth such study as that which Mr. Taylor gives 
them, if only because they represented what re- 
garded itself as the highest spiritual and intel- 
lectual teaching of the time, and because they 
symbolized the forces which manifested them- 
selves with infinitely more permanent value in 
that wonderful cathedral architecture which was 
one of the two culminating architectural move- 
ments of all time — the other, of course, being 
the classical Greek. But the greatest mediaeval 
effect upon the thought of after time was produced, 
not by the schoolmen, but by works which they 
would hardly have treated as serious at all — by 
the Roland Song, the "Nibelungenlied," the Norse 
and Irish sagas, the Arthurian Cycle, including 
''Parsifal"; and modem literature, on its his- 
torical side, may be said to have begun with Ville- 
hardouin and Joinville. None of the leaders of 
the schools are to-day living forces in the sense 
that is true of the nameless writers who built up 
the stories of the immortal death fights in the 
Pyrenean pass and in the hall of Etzel, or of the 
search for the Holy Grail. There are keen intel- 



PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP 203 

lects still influenced by Thomas Aquinas; but 
all the writings of all the most famous doctors of 
the schools taken together had no such influence 
on the religious thought of mankind as two books 
produced long afterward, with no conception of 
their far-reaching importance, by the obscure and 
humble authors of the "Imitation of Christ" and 
the "Pilgrim's Progress." In the thirteenth cen- 
tury the spiritual life in action, as apart from 
dogma, and as lived with the earnest desire to 
follow in the footsteps of the Christ, reached, in 
the person of Saint Francis of Assisi, as lofty a 
pinnacle of realized idealism as humanity has ever 
attained. But among those who, instead of try- 
ing simply to live up to their spiritual impulses, 
endeavored to deal authoritatively in the schools 
with spiritual and intellectual interests, the com- 
plementary tyranny and servility in all such 
spiritual and intellectual matters were such as 
we can now hardly imagine to ourselves. The 
one really great scientific investigator, Roger 
Bacon, who actually did put as an ideal before 
himself the honest search for truth, was impris- 
oned for years in consequence; and this in spite 
of the fact that his avowals of abject submission 
to theological authority and unquestioning ad- 
herence to dogma were such as we of to-day can 
with difficulty understand. 

At first sight such an attitude in the intellectual 



204 PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP 

world seems incompatible with the turbulent and 
lawless insistence on the right of each individual 
to do whatever he saw fit in the political and 
social world which characterized the seething life 
of the time. But, as Mr. Taylor points out, the 
minute that a man in the Middle Ages began to 
be free in any real sense he tended to become an 
outlaw; and, moreover, the men who were most 
intolerant of restraint in matters physical and 
material made no demands whatever for intel- 
lectual or spiritual freedom. The ordinary knight 
or nobleman, the typical "man of action" of the 
period, promptly resented any attempt to inter- 
fere with his brutal passions or coarse appetites; 
but, as he had neither special interest nor deep 
conviction in merely intellectual matters, he was 
entirely willing to submit to guidance concerning 
them. The attitude of the great baron of the 
highest class is amusingly shown by a conversa- 
tion that Joinville records as having occurred be- 
tween himself and King Louis the Saint. Among 
the questions which King Louis one day pro- 
pounded to Joinville, in the interests of the higher 
morality, was whether Joinville would rather have 
leprosy or commit a mortal sin; to which Join- 
ville responded with cordial frankness that he 
would rather commit thirty mortal sins than have 
leprosy. Now, in addition to being a most de- 
lightful chronicler, Joinville was an exceptionally 



PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP 205 

well-behaved and religious baron, standing far 
above the average, and he was very careful to 
perform every obligation laid upon him by those 
whom he regarded as his spiritual advisers. The 
fact simply was that he had no idea of the need 
for spiritual or intellectual independence in the 
sense that a modem man has need for such in- 
dependence, because he took only a superficial in- 
terest in anything concerned with intellectual 
inquiry. To harry a heretic or a Jew was not 
only a duty but a pleasure, and no effort whatever 
was needed to refrain from intellectual inquiry 
which presented to him not the slightest attrac- 
tion; but leprosy was something tangible, some- 
thing real, and the instant that the real came into 
collision with even the most insistent supposed 
spiritual obligation the rugged old baron went into 
immediate revolt. 

The whole way of looking at life was so dif- 
ferent from ours that only a thoroughly sympa- 
thetic and understanding writer like Mr. Taylor 
can set it forth in a manner that shall be sym- 
pathetic and yet not revolt us. One of his most 
delightful chapters is that on ''The Heart of 
Heloise." The qualities that Heloise displayed 
are those which eternally appeal to what is high 
and fine in human life; as for her lover, Abelard, 
it is possible to pardon the abject creature only 
by scornfully condemning the age which imposed 



2o6 PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP 

upon him the rules of conduct in accordance with 
which he Hved. 

Mr. Thayer's "Life of Cavour" is another first- 
rate example of productive scholarship. It is 
much more than a mere biography. The three 
greatest and most influential statesmen, in pur- 
pose and achievement, since the close of the Na- 
poleonic epoch were Lincoln, Bismarck, and Ca- 
vour; and any account of either of them must 
necessarily be an account of the most vitally im- 
portant things that happened to mankind during 
the period when each was playing his greatest 
part. An adequate biography of either must there- 
fore be a permanent addition to history; such 
a biography could be written only by a scholar 
and writer of altogether exceptional attainments; 
and such a biography has been furnished by 
Mr. Thayer. Mr. Thayer is already well known 
as the author of various volumes dealing with 
Italy, all of them representing work worth doing, 
and all of them leading up to and making ready 
the way for the really notable history which he 
has now written. There are other books which 
should be read in connection with it ; the yoimger 
Trevelyan's brilliant studies of Garibaldi and the 
Italian revolutionists of 1848 and the dozen years 
immediately succeeding, and De La Gorce's pro- 
foundly interesting histories of the Second Empire 
and the Second Republic in France, which con- 



PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP 207 

tain the most powerful presentment of the period 
from the anti-revolutionary standpoint. Cavour 
not only did more than any other one man for 
Italian unity and independence, but he symbol- 
ized the movement as neither Garibaldi the Pala- 
din, nor Mazzini the Republican, nor even King 
Victor Emmanuel symbolized it. As Mr. Thayer 
describes Cavour's career it is not only of interest 
in itself, but it is of interest as showing that vast 
and complex aggregate of contradictory forces 
through whose warring chaos every great leader 
who fights for the well-being of mankind must 
force his way to triumph. Cavour had to contend 
against foes within just as much as against foes 
without. He had to hold the balance between 
the unreasoning reactionary and the unreasoning 
revolutionist, just exactly as on a larger or smaller 
scale all leaders in the forward movement of man- 
kind must ever do. Mr. Thayer has set forth in 
masterly fashion the task to which the great 
statesman addressed himself and the manner in 
which that task was performed; his book is ab- 
sorbingly interesting to the general reader, and 
should be of profit not merely to the special stu- 
dent but to every active politician who is in poli- 
tics for any of the reasons which alone render it 
really worth while to be a politician at all. Mr. 
Thayer is devoted to his hero, as he ought to 
be; and he is a stanch partisan; but his obvious 



2o8 PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP 

purpose is to be fair, and the principles of liberty 
to which he pins his faith are those upon which 
American governmental policy must always rest 
— although it is not necessary to follow him in all 
his views, as when he suddenly treats free trade 
from the fetichistic standpoint instead of as an 
economic expedient to be judged on its merits in 
any given case. Every man interested not only 
in the realities but in the possibilities of political 
advance should study this book; and, in addition 
to its intrinsic worth and interest, it is an example 
of the kind of productive scholarship which adds 
to the sum of American achievement. 

Anything that Professor Lounsbury writes is 
certain to be interesting. Any collection by him 
of the writings of others is also certain to be in- 
teresting. Probably when Mr. Lounsbury is do- 
ing what he himself is willing to accept as work, 
it is both so profound and so erudite that we 
laymen can do little but admire it from a dis- 
tance. Fortunately, however, he is also willing 
to do what he regards as play, such as a Life of 
Fenimore Cooper, or a study of English adapted 
to the needs of those who are not scholars; and 
all of his writing of this lighter kind adds markedly 
to the sum of enjoyment of laymen who are fond 
of reading. 

The two volumes before me illustrate the good 



PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP 209 

that can be done by people of cultivation who at 
our different universities provide the means need- 
ed to foster productive scholarship — for, unfortu- 
nately, productive scholarship in this country is 
apt to be unremunerative. The slender volume 
on the early literary career of Robert Browning ^ 
is based on four lectures delivered at the Univer- 
sity of Virginia under the terms of the Barbour- 
Page Foundation, a foundation due to the wisdom 
and generosity of Mrs. Thomas Nelson Page. 
The ''Yale Book of American Verse" ^ is pub- 
lished by the Yale University Press under the 
auspices of the Elizabethan Club of Yale Univer- 
sity, a club founded by Mr. Alexander Smith 
Cochran. It is the kind of club the possession of 
which every real university in the country must 
envy Yale. 

This study of Browning particularly appeals to 
any man who, although devoted to Browning, 
yet does not care for the pieces that some of the 
Browning clubs especially delight in. Browning's 
great poems, those which will last as long as Eng- 
lish literature lasts, are given their full meed of 
praise by Professor Lounsbury. The other poems, 
those which especially excite the interest of the 
average Browning society, are treated very amu- 

^ "The Early Literary Career of Robert Browning." By Thomas 
R. Lounsbury. 

2 "Yale Book of American Verse." Collected by Thomas R. 
Lounsbury. 



2IO PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP 

singly and on the whole very justly. Professor 
Lounsbury insists that these ''poems" will not 
permanently last, because they are essentially 
formless, and therefore not poetry at all, and in- 
deed not literature. He holds that the attraction 
such poems exercise on certain people is the at- 
traction of the unintelligible. Mr. Loimsbury's 
writings are always full of delicious touches, and 
he is sometimes at his best in this little voliune, 
as, for instance, where he says: ''In fact, com- 
mentaries on Browning generally bear a close re- 
semblance to fog-horns. They proclaim the ex- 
istence of fog, but they do not disperse it." One 
of his main contentions is that fimdamentally 
the interest in those poems of Browning which 
are both very long and very obscure does not differ 
in kind from that displayed in guessing the an- 
swers to riddles or, to use a more dignified com- 
parison, from that employed in the solution of 
difficult mathematical problems. 

I think, however, that for the admiration 
of these rather obscure philosophical poems of 
Browning there is a reason upon which Mr. Loims- 
bury has not touched. He says truly that the 
men who admire Browning are very apt to be 
men not especially drawn to writers in whom 
lofty speculations have found their fitting coimter- 
part in clearness and beauty of expression; and 
he instances Wordsworth and Tennyson as poets 



PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP 211 

to be enjoyed only by men and women who have 
a certain degree of fondness for literature as 
literature. Now, I think it is true of Browning 
(as it is true of Walt Whitman) that many of the 
people who labor longest and hardest to master 
his meaning are entirely mistaken in thinking that 
they enjoy him as a poet. But I do not think 
that Mr. Lounsbury's explanation that they prize 
him only as a puzzle fully accounts for the enjoy- 
ment of many of these men or the profit they de- 
rive from their study. The fact is that Browning 
does represent very deep thought, very real phi- 
losophy — mixed, of course, with much thought 
that is not deep at all but only obscure, and much 
would-be philosophy that has no meaning what- 
soever. In an instance that came to my own 
knowledge, a class of college boys in a course of 
literature, after carefully studying Browning for 
a couple of months, and after then taking up 
Tennyson, tmanimously abandoned Tennyson and 
insisted on returning to the study of Browning. 
These hard-working, intelligent boys were not all 
of them merely interested in puzzles. They were 
not all of them blind to poetry as such. They did 
care to a certain extent for form, but primarily 
they were interested in the great problems of life, 
they were interested in great and noble thoughts. 
Doubtless many of them rather enjoyed having 
to dig out the thought from involved language. 



212 PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP 

But probably a greater number felt a larger en- 
joyment in finding lofty thought expressed in lan- 
guage which was even more lofty than obscure. 

It is true that as a poet Browning is formless. 
But the poets who are great philosophers are few 
in number, and great philosophers who have any 
gift of expression whatever or any sense of form, 
or whose writings so much as approach the outer 
hem of literature, are even fewer in number. 
Browning the philosopher is not more deep than 
many other philosophers, and in form and expres- 
sion he is inferior to many poets. But he is a phi- 
losopher, and he has form and expression. The 
philosophy he writes is literature, even though 
hardly in the highest sense poetic literature. 
Therefore he appeals to men who are primarily 
interested in his writings as philosophy, but who 
do derive a certain pleasure from form or expres- 
sion; who, without being conscious of it, do like 
to have the writings they read resemble literature. 
These men are given by Browning something 
that no other poet and no other philosopher can 
give them; and I do not think that these men 
receive full justice at Mr. Lounsbury's hands. 
Moreover, as compared to Tennyson or Longfel- 
low, or any other of the more conventional poets 
— and I am extremely fond of these conventional 
poets — there is far more in Browning, even in 
Browning's simpler and more understandable and 



PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP 213 

formal poems, that gives expression to certain 
deep and complex emotions. There are many 
poets whom we habitually read far more often 
than Browning, and w^ho minister better to our 
more primitive needs and emotions. There are 
very few whose lines come so naturally to us in 
certain great crises of the soul which are also 
crises of the intellect. 

''The Yale Book of American Verse" is an 
excellent anthology, and the preface is one of the 
best things about it. In this preface Mr. Louns- 
bury quite unconsciously shows why he appeals 
to so many men to whom a college professor who 
is nothing more than a college professor does not 
readily appeal. He mentions that on the march 
to Gettysburg he picked up a torn piece of news- 
paper containing certain verses which have al- 
ways remained in his mind, and which he includes 
in this collection of verse. This is the only hint 
in Professor Lounsbury's writings that he fought 
in the Civil War. A professor of English litera- 
ture in a great university who in his youth fought 
at Gettysburg must necessarily have something 
in him that speaks not only to scholars but to men. 

This anthology includes hymns as well as secular 
poems. The collection is good in itself, as I have 
already said, and, moreover, to all real lovers of 
anthologies it will also seem good because each 



214 



PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP 



of them will take much satisfaction in wondering 
why certain of his or her favorite poems have been 
left out and why certain other poems have been 
put in. I suppose every man who cares for poetry 
at all at times wishes that he could compile an 
anthology for his own purposes. I certainly so 
feel. I would like to compile two anthologies, 
one of hymns and one of those poems which our 
ancestors designated quite ruthlessly as "pro- 
fane," in opposition to sacred. I should not ex- 
pect any one else to read either of my collections. 
I should not wish the edition to consist of more 
than one copy. But I would like, purely for my 
own use, to own that copy! In the anthology of 
hymns, for instance, besides all the great hymns, 
from Bernard of Morlais to Cowper and Wesley 
and Bishop Heber, I would like to put in some 
hymns as to which I know nothing except that 
I like them. Every Christmas Eve in our own 
church at Oyster Bay, for instance, the children 
sing a hymn beginning ''It's Christmas Eve on 
the River, it's Christmas Eve on the Bay." Of 
course the hymn has come to us from somewhere 
else, but I do not know from where; and the 
average native of our village firmly believes that 
it is indigenous to our own soil — which it can not 
be, unless it deals in hyperbole, for the nearest ap- 
proach to a river in our neighborhood is the vil- 
lage pond. 



PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP 215 

As for the ''profane" anthology, I think I 
should like to make one consisting of several vol- 
umes. Even Mr. Lounsbury's volume of American 
verse, though it contains some specimens of verse 
I would not have included, omits others which I 
certainly should put in. And then, think of the 
many, many volumes that would be needed to 
include the English poems, and the French poems, 
and the German poems from the Bard of the 
Dimbovitza, and all the other poems which no 
human being could make up his mind to see any 
anthology leave out! I fear that a perfect an- 
thology of the kind that fills my dreams would be 
as large as the various rather dismal series of 
volumes which contain, as we are told, "the world's 
best literature" — and doubtless would be as im- 
satisfactory. 

Meanwhile, as all this represents an imattain- 
able dream, we have reason to be glad that Mr. 
Loimsbury's particular anthology has been pub- 
lished. 



DANTE AND THE BOWERY 



DANTE AND THE BOWERY 

IT is the conventional thing to praise Dante 
because he of set purpose ''used the language 
of the market-place," so as to be understanded 
of the common people; but we do not in practice 
either admire or understand a man who writes 
in the language of our own market-place. It 
must be the Florentine market-place of the thir- 
teenth century — not Fulton Market of to-day. 
What infinite use Dante would have made of the 
Bowery! Of course, he could have done it only 
because not merely he himself, the great poet, 
but his audience also, would have accepted it as 
natural. The nineteenth century was more apt 
than the thirteenth to boast of itself as being the 
greatest of the centuries; but, save as regards 
purely material objects, ranging from locomotives 
to bank buildings, it did not wholly believe in its 
boasting. A nineteenth-century poet, when try- 
ing to illustrate some point he was making, ob- 
viously felt uncomfortable in mentioning nine- 
teenth-century heroes if he also referred to those 
of classic times, lest he should be suspected of 
instituting comparisons between them. A thir- 

219 



220 DANTE AND THE BOWERY 

teenth-century poet was not in the least troubled 
by any such misgivings, and quite simply illus- 
trated his point by allusions to any character in 
history or romance, ancient or contemporary, that 
happened to occur to him. 

Of all the poets of the nineteenth century, Walt 
Whitman was the only one who dared use the 
Bowery — that is, use anything that was striking 
and vividly typical of the humanity aroimd him 
— as Dante used the ordinary humanity of his 
day ; and even Whitman was not quite natural in 
doing so, for he always felt that he was defying 
the conventions and prejudices of his neighbors, 
and his self -consciousness made him a little de- 
fiant. Dante was not defiant of conventions : the 
conventions of his day did not forbid him to use 
human nature just as he saw it, no less than 
himian nature as he read about it. The Bowery 
is one of the great highways of humanity, a high- 
way of seething life, of varied interest, of fun, of 
work, of sordid and terrible tragedy; and it is 
haunted by demons as evil as any that stalk 
through the pages of the ''Inferno." But no man 
of Dante's art and with Dante's soul would write 
of it nowadays; and he would hardly be imder- 
stood if he did. Whitman wrote of homely things 
and every-day men, and of their greatness, but his 
art was not equal to his power and his purpose; 
and, even as it was, he, the poet, by set intention. 



DANTE AND THE BOWERY 221 

of the democracy, is not known to the people as 
widely as he should be known; and it is only the 
few — the men like Edward FitzGerald, John Bur- 
roughs, and W. E. Henley — who prize him as he 
ought to be prized. 

Nowadays, at the outset of the twentieth cen- 
tury, cultivated people would ridicule the poet 
who illustrated fimdamental truths, as Dante did 
six hundred years ago, by examples drawn alike 
from human nature as he saw it around him and 
from human nature as he read of it. I suppose 
that this must be partly because we are so self- 
conscious as always to read a comparison into any 
illustration, forgetting the fact that no compar- 
ison is implied between two men, in the sense 
of estimating their relative greatness or impor- 
tance, when the career of each of them is chosen 
merely to illustrate some given quality that both 
possess. It is also probably due to the fact that 
an age in which the critical faculty is greatly de- 
veloped often tends to develop a certain querulous 
inability to understand the fundamental truths 
which less critical ages accept as a matter of 
course. To such critics it seems improper, and 
indeed ludicrous, to illustrate human nature by 
examples chosen alike from the Brooklyn Navy 
Yard or Castle Garden and the Piraeus, alike from 
Tammany and from the Roman mob organized 
by the foes or friends of Caesar. To Dante such 
feeling itself would have been inexplicable. 



222 DANTE AND THE BOWERY 

Dante dealt with those tremendous qualities 
of the human soul which dwarf all differences in 
outward and visible form and station, and there- 
fore he illustrated what he meant by any example 
that seemed to him apt. Only the great names 
of antiquity had been handed down, and so, when 
he spoke of pride or violence or flattery, and wished 
to illustrate his thesis by an appeal to the past, 
he could speak only of great and prominent char- 
acters; but in the present of his day most of the 
men he knew, or knew of, were naturally people 
of no permanent importance — just as is the case 
in the present of our own day. Yet the passions 
of these men were the same as those of the heroes 
of old, godlike or demoniac; and so he unhesita- 
tingly used his contemporaries, or his immediate 
predecessors, to illustrate his points, without re- 
gard to their prominence or lack of prominence. 
He was not concerned with the differences in their 
fortunes and careers, with their heroic proportions 
or lack of such proportions; he was a mystic 
whose imagination soared so high and whose 
thoughts plumbed so deeply the far depths of our 
being that he was also quite simply a realist; for 
the eternal mysteries were ever before his mind, 
and, compared to them, the differences between 
the careers of the mighty masters of mankind 
and the careers of even very humble people seemed 
trivial. If we translate his comparisons into the 
terms of our day, we are apt to feel amused over 



DANTE AND THE BOWERY 223 

this trait of his, until we go a little deeper and 
understand that we are ourselves to blame, be- 
cause we have lost the faculty simply and naturally 
to recognize that the essential traits of humanity 
are shown alike by big men and by little men, in 
the lives that are now being lived and in those 
that are long ended. 

Probably no two characters in Dante impress 
the ordinary reader more than Farinata and 
Capaneus: the man who raises himself waist- 
high from out his burning sepulchre, unshaken by 
torment, and the man who, with scornful disdain, 
refuses to brush from his body the falling flames; 
the great souls — magnanimous, Dante calls them 
— whom no torture, no disaster, no failure of the 
most absolute kind could force to yield or to 
bow before the dread powers that had mastered 
them. Dante has created these men, has made 
them permanent additions to the great figures of 
the world; they are imaginary only in the sense 
that Achilles and Ulysses are imaginary — that is, 
they are now as real as the figures of any men 
that ever lived. One of them was a mythical 
hero in a mythical feat, the other a second-rate 
faction leader in a faction-ridden Italian city of 
the thirteenth century, whose deeds have not the 
slightest importance aside from what Dante's 
mention gives. Yet the two men are mentioned 
as naturally as Alexander and Caesar are men- 



224 



DANTE AND THE BOWERY 



tioned. Evidently they are dwelt upon at length 
because Dante felt it his duty to express a peculiar 
horror for that fierce pride which could defy its 
overlord, while at the same time, and perhaps un- 
willingly, he could not conceal a certain shudder- 
ing admiration for the lofty courage on which this 
evil pride was based. 

The point I wish to make is the simplicity with 
which Dante illustrated one of the principles on 
which he lays most stress, by the example of a 
man who was of consequence only in the history 
of the parochial politics of Florence. Farinata 
will now live forever as a symbol of the soul ; yet 
as an historical figure he is dwarfed beside any one 
of hundreds of the leaders in our own Revolu- 
tion and Civil War. Tom Benton, of Missouri, 
and Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi, were opposed 
to one another with a bitterness which surpassed 
that which rived asunder Guelph from Ghibellin, 
or black Guelph from white Guelph. They played 
mighty parts in a tragedy more tremendous 
than any which any mediaeval city ever witnessed 
or could have witnessed. Each possessed an iron 
will and imdaunted courage, physical and moral; 
each led a life of varied interest and danger, and 
exercised a power not possible in the career of the 
Florentine. One, the champion of the Union, 
fought for his principles as unyieldingly as the 
other fought for what he deemed right in trying 



DANTE AND THE BOWERY 225 

to break up the Union. Each was a colossal 
figure. Each, when the forces against which he 
fought overcame him — for in his latter years Ben- 
ton saw the cause of disimion triumph in Missouri, 
just as Jefferson Davis lived to see the cause of 
union triumph in the Nation — fronted an adverse 
fate with the frowning defiance, the high heart, 
and the stubborn will which Dante has commem- 
orated for all time in his hero who ''held hell in 
great scorn." Yet a modem poet who endeav- 
ored to illustrate such a point by reference to 
Benton and Davis would be imcomfortably con- 
scious that his audience would laugh at him. He 
would feel ill at ease, and therefore would convey 
the impression of being ill at ease, exactly as he 
would feel that he was posing, was forced and un- 
natural, if he referred to the deeds of the evil 
heroes of the Paris Commune as he would with- 
out hesitation refer to the many similar but 
smaller leaders of riots in the Roman forum. 

Dante speaks of a couple of French trouba- 
dours, or of a local Sicilian poet, just as he speaks 
of Euripides; and quite properly, for they illus- 
trate as well what he has to teach; but we of to- 
day could not possibly speak of a couple of recent 
French poets or German novelists in the same 
connection without having an uncomfortable feel- 
ing that we ought to defend ourselves from possi- 
ble misapprehension; and therefore we could not 



226 DANTE AND THE BOWERY 

speak of them naturally. When Dante wishes to 
assail those guilty of crimes of violence, he in 
one stanza speaks of the torments inflicted by 
divine justice on Attila (coupling him with Pyrrhus 
and Sextus Pompey — a sufficiently odd conjunc- 
tion in itself, by the way), and in the next stanza 
mentions the names of a couple of local highway- 
men who had made travel unsafe in particular 
neighborhoods. The two highwaymen in ques- 
tion were by no means as important as Jesse James 
and Billy the Kid; doubtless they were far less 
formidable fighting men, and their adventures 
were less striking and varied. Yet think of the 
way we should feel if a great poet should now 
arise who would incidentally illustrate the feroc- 
ity of the human heart by allusions both to the 
terrible Himnish "scourge of God" and to the 
outlaws who in our own times defied justice in 
Missouri and New Mexico! 

When Dante wishes to illustrate the fierce 
passions of the human heart, he may speak of 
Lycurgus, or of Saul; or he may speak of two 
local contemporary captains, victor or vanquished 
in obscure struggles between Guelph and Ghibel- 
lin; men like Jacopo del Cassero or Buonconte, 
whom he mentions as naturally as he does Cyrus 
or Rehoboam. He is entirely right! What one 
among our own writers, however, would be able 
simply and naturally to mention Ulrich Dahlgren, 



DANTE AND THE BOWERY 227 

or Custer, or Morgan, or Raphael Semmes, or 
Marion, or Sumter, as illustrating the qualities 
shown by Hannibal, or Rameses, or William the 
Conqueror, or by Moses or Hercules? Yet the 
Guelph and Ghibellin captains of whom Dante 
speaks were in no way as important as these 
American soldiers of the second or third rank. 
Dante saw nothing incongruous in treating at 
length of the qualities of all of them; he was not 
thinking of comparing the genius of the unim- 
portant local leader with the genius of the great 
sovereign conquerors of the past — ^he was thinking 
only of the qualities of courage and daring and of 
the awful horror of death ; and when we deal with 
what is elemental in the human soul it matters 
but little whose soul we take. In the same way 
he mentions a couple of spendthrifts of Padua and 
Siena, who come to violent ends, just as in the 
preceding canto he had dwelt upon the tortures 
undergone by Dionysius and Simon de Montfort, 
guarded by Nessus and his fellow centaurs. For 
some reason he hated the spendthrifts in question 
as the Whigs of Revolutionary South Carolina 
and New York hated Tarleton, Kruger, Saint 
Leger, and De Lancey ; and to him there was noth- 
ing incongruous in drawing a lesson from one 
couple of offenders more than from another. (It 
would, by the way, be outside my present purpose 
to speak of the rather puzzling manner in which 



228 DANTE AND THE BOWERY 

Dante confounds his own hatreds with those of 
heaven, and, for instance, shows a vindictive en- 
joyment in putting his personal opponent Filippo 
Argenti in hell, for no clearly adequate reason.) 

When he turns from those whom he is glad to 
see in hell toward those for whom he cares, he 
shows the same delightful power of penetrating 
through the externals into the essentials. Cato 
and Manfred illustrate his point no better than 
Belacqua, a contemporary Florentine maker of 
citherns. Alas! what poet to-day would dare 
to illustrate his argument by introducing Stein- 
way in company with Cato and Manfred! Yet 
again, when examples of love are needed, he draws 
them from the wedding-feast at Cana, from the 
actions of Pylades and Orestes, and from the life 
of a kindly, honest comb-dealer of Siena who had 
just died. Could we now link together Peter 
Cooper and Pylades, without feeling a sense of 
incongruity? He couples Priscian with a poli- 
tician of local note who had written an encyclo- 
paedia and a lawyer of distinction who had lec- 
tured at Bologna and Oxford; we could not now 
with such fine imconsciousness bring Evarts and 
one of the compilers of the Encyclopaedia Britan- 
nica into a like comparison. 

When Dante deals with the crimes which he 
most abhorred, simony and barratry, he flails 
offenders of his age who were of the same type as 



DANTE AND THE BOWERY 229 

those who in our days flourish by political or 
commercial corruption; and he names his of- 
fenders, both those just dead and those still living, 
and puts them, popes and politicians alike, in 
hell. There have been trust magnates and poli- 
ticians and editors and magazine-writers in our 
own country whose lives and deeds were no more 
edifying than those of the men who lie in the 
third and the fifth chasm of the eighth circle of 
the Inferno; yet for a poet to name those men 
would be condemned as an instance of shocking 
taste. 

One age expresses itself naturally in a form 
that would be unnatural, and therefore undesir- 
able, in another age. We do not express ourselves 
nowadays in epics at all; and we keep the emo- 
tions aroused in us by what is good or evil in the 
men of the present in a totally different com- 
partment from that which holds our emotions 
concerning what was good or evil in the men of 
the past. An imitation of the letter of the times 
past, when the spirit has wholly altered, would be 
worse than useless; and the very qualities that 
help to make Dante's poem immortal would, if 
copied nowadays, make the copyist ridiculous. 
Nevertheless, it would be a good thing if we could, 
in some measure, achieve the mighty Florentine's 
high simplicity of soul, at least to the extent of 
recognizing in those around us the eternal qual- 



230 DANTE AND THE BOWERY 

ities which we admire or condemn in the men who 
wrought good or evil at any stage in the world's 
previous history. Dante's masterpiece is one of 
the supreme works of art that the ages have wit- 
nessed; but he would have been the last to wish 
that it should be treated only as a work of art, or 
worshipped only for art's sake, without reference 
to the dread lessons it teaches mankind. 



THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE 
NINETEENTH CENTURY 



THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE 
NINETEENTH CENTURY ^ 

MR. H. S. CHAMBERLAIN'S work on 
"The Foundations of the Nineteenth 
Century" is a noteworthy book in more 
ways than one. It is written by an EngHshman 
who has been educated on the Continent, and 
has lived there imtil he is much more German 
than EngHsh. Previously he had written a book 
in French, while this particular book was written 
in German, and has only recently been translated 
into English. Adequately to review the book, or 
rather to write an adequate essay suggested by 
it, would need the space that would have been 
taken by an old-time Quarterly or Edinburgh Re- 
viewer a century or fourscore years ago. I have 
called the book "noteworthy," and this it cer- 
tainly is. It ranks with Buckle's "History of 
Civilization," and still more with Gobineau's 
"Inegalite des Races Humaines," for its brilliancy 
and suggestiveness and also for its startling in- 
accuracies and lack of judgment. A witty Eng- 

^"The Foundation's of the Nineteenth Century." By Houston 
Stewart Chamberlain. A translation from the German, by John 
Lees. With an introduction by Lord Redesdale. In two volumes. 

233 



234 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 

lish critic once remarked of Mitford that he had 
all the qualifications of an historian — violent par- 
tiality and extreme wrath. Mr. Chamberlain 
certainly possesses these qualifications in excess, 
and, combined with a queer vein of the erratic 
in his temperament, they almost completely 
offset the value of his extraordinary erudition, ex- 
tending into widely varied fields, and of his occa- 
sionally really brilliant inspiration. He is, how- 
ever, always entertaining; which is of itself no 
mean merit, in view of the fact that most serious 
writers seem unable to regard themselves as seri- 
ous unless they are also dull. 

Mr. Chamberlain's thesis is that the nineteenth 
century, and therefore the twentieth and all future 
centuries, depend for everything in them worth 
mentioning and preserving upon the Teutonic 
branch of the Aryan race. He holds that there 
is no such thing as a general progress of man- 
kind, that progress is only for those whom he 
calls the Teutons, and that when they mix with 
or are intruded upon by alien and, as he regards 
them, lower races, the result is fatal. Much that 
he says regarding the prevalent loose and sloppy 
talk about the general progress of humanity, the 
equaUty and identity of races, and the like, is 
not only perfectly true, but is emphatically worth 
considering by a generation accustomed, as its 
forefathers for the preceding generations were ac- 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 235 

customed, to accept as true and useful thoroughly 
pernicious doctrines taught by well-meaning and 
feeble-minded sentimentalists; but Mr. Chamber- 
lain himself is quite as fantastic an extremist as 
any of those whom he derides, and an extremist 
whose doctrines are based upon foolish hatred is 
even more unlovely than an extremist whose doc- 
trines are based upon foolish benevolence. Mr. 
Chamberlain's hatreds cover a wide gamut. They 
include Jews, Darwinists, the Roman Catholic 
Church, the people of southern Europe, Peru- 
vians, Semites, and an odd variety of literary 
men and historians.^ To this sufficiently incon- 
gruous collection of antipathies he adds a much 
smaller selection of violent attachments, ranging 
from imaginary primitive Teutons and Aryans 
to Immanuel Kant, and Indian theology, meta- 
physics, and philosophy — he draws sharp distinc- 
tions between all three, and I merely use them 
to indicate his admiration for the Indian habit 
of thought, an admiration which goes hand in 
hand with and accentuates his violent hatred for 
what most sane people regard as the far nobler 
thought contained, for instance, in the Old Testa- 
ment. He continually contradicts himself, or at 

^ Some of his antipathies appeal to the present writer; I much 
enjoy his irrelevant and hearty denunciation of the folly of treating 
the comparatively trivial Latin literature as of such peculiar impor- 
tance as to entitle it to be grouped in grotesque association with the 
magnificent Greek literature under the unmeaning title of "classic." 



236 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 

least uses words in such diametrically opposite 
senses as to convey the effect of contradiction; 
and so it would be possible to choose phrases of 
his which contradict what is here said; but 
I think that I give a correct impression of his 
teaching as a whole. 

As he touches lightly on an infinitely varied 
range of subjects, it would be possible to choose 
almost at random passages to justify what is said 
above. Take, for instance, his dogmatic assertions 
concerning faith and works. He frantically con- 
demns the doctrine of salvation by works and 
frantically exalts the doctrine of salvation by 
faith. Much that he says about both doctrines 
must be taken in so mystical and involved a sense 
that it contains little real meaning to ordinary 
men. Yet he is also capable of expressing, on this 
very subject, noble thought in a lofty manner. 
In one of his sudden lapses into brilliant sanity he 
emphasizes the fact that Saint Francis of Assisi 
was faith incorporate and yet the special apostle 
of good works; and that Martin Luther, the ad- 
vocate of redemption by faith, consecrated his 
life and revealed to others the secret of good works 
— "free works done only to please God, not for 
the sake of piety." 

Unfortunately, these brilliant lapses into sanity 
are fixed in a matrix of fairly bedlamite passion 
and non-sanity. Mr. Chamberlain jeers with rea- 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 237 

son at the Roman Curia because until 1822 it 
kept on the Index all books which taught that the 
earth went round the sun; but really such action 
is not much worse than that of a man professing 
to write a book like this at the outset of the twen- 
tieth century who takes the attitude Mr. Cham- 
berlain does toward the teaching of Darwin. The 
acceptance of the fundamental truths of evolution 
are quite as necessary to soimd scientific thought 
as the acceptance of the fimdamental truths con- 
cerning the solar system; and the attempt that 
Mr. Chamberlain in one place makes to draw a 
distinction between them is fantastic. Again, take 
what Mr. Chamberlain says of Aryans and Teu- 
tons. He bursts the flood-gates of scorn when he 
deals with persons who idealize humanity, or, as 
he styles it, ''so-called humanity"; and he says: 
''For this himianity about which man has phi- 
losophized to such an extent suffers from the 
serious defect that it does not exist at all. His- 
tory reveals to us a great number of various hu- 
man beings, but no such thing as humanity"; 
yet on this very page he attributes the history of 
the growth of our civihzation to its "Teutonic" 
character, and he uses the word "Teuton" as 
well as the word "Aryan" with as utter a loose- 
ness and vagueness as ever any philanthropist or 
revolutionist used the word ' ' humanity. ' ' All that 
he says in derision of such a forced use of the 



238 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 

word "humanity" could with a much greater per- 
centage of truthfulness be said as regards the 
words and ideas symbolized by Teutonism and 
Aryanism as Mr. Chamberlain uses these terms. 
Indeed, as he uses them they amount to little 
more than expressions of his personal likes and 
dislikes. His statement of the raceless chaos into 
which the Roman Empire finally lapsed is, on the 
whole, just, and, to use the words continually 
coming to one's mind in dealing with him, both 
brilliant and suggestive. But in his anxiety to 
claim everything good for Aryans and Teutons 
he finally reduces himself to the position of insist- 
ing that wherever he sees a man whom he admires 
he must postulate for him Aryan, and, better still, 
Teutonic blood. He likes David, so he promptly 
makes him an Aryan Amorite. He likes Michael 
Angelo, and Dante, and Leonardo da Vinci, and 
he instantly says that they are Teutons; but he 
does not like Napoleon, and so he says that Na- 
poleon is a true representative of the raceless chaos. 
The noted Italians in question, he states, were all 
of German origin, descended from the Germans 
who had conquered Italy in the sixth century. 
Now, of course, if Mr. Chamberlain is willing to 
be serious with himself, he must know perfectly 
well that even by the time of Dante seven or 
eight centuries had passed, and by the time of the 
other great Italians he mentions eight or ten cen- 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 239 

turies had passed, since the Germanic invasion. 
In other words, these great Itahans were sepa- 
rated from the days of the Gothic and Lombard 
invasions by the distance which separates modern 
England from the Norman invasion; and his 
thesis has just about as much substance as would 
be contained in the statement that Wellington, 
Nelson, Turner, Wordsworth, and Tennyson ex- 
celled in their several spheres because they were 
all pure-blood descendants of the motley crew 
that came in with William the Conqueror. The 
different ethnic elements which entered into the 
Italy of the seventh century were in complete 
solution by the thirteenth, and it would have been 
quite as impossible to trace them to their sev- 
eral original strains as nowadays to trace in the 
average Englishman the various strains of blood 
from his Norman, Saxon, Celtic, and Scandina- 
vian ancestors. Nor does Mr. Chamberlain mind 
believing two incompatible things in the quickest 
possible succession if they happen to suit his phi- 
losophy of the moment. Generally, when he 
speaks of the Teuton he thinks of the tall, long- 
headed man of the north; although, because of 
some crank in his mind, he puts in the proviso 
that he may have black as well as blond hair. 
The round-skulled man of middle Europe he 
usually condemns; but if his mind happens to 
run with approbation toward the Tyrolese, for 



240 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 

instance, he at once forgets what ethnic division 
of Europeans it is to which they belong, and ac- 
cepts them as typical Teutons. He greatly ad- 
mires the teaching of the Apostle Paul, and so he 
endeavors to persuade himself that the Apostle 
Paul was not really a Jew; but he does not like 
the teachings of the Epistle of James on the sub- 
ject of good works (teachings for which I have a 
peculiar sympathy, by the way), and accordingly 
he says that James was a pure Jew. 

Fundamentally, very many of Mr. Chamber- 
lain's ideas are true and noble. I admire the 
morality with which he condemns the intolerance 
of Calvin and Luther no less strongly than the in- 
tolerance of their Roman opponents, and yet his 
acceptance of the fact that they could not have 
done their great work if there had not been in 
their characters an alloy which made it possible 
for actual humanity to accept their teaching. 
But even his sense of morality is as curiously ca- 
pricious as that of Carlyle himself, and as little 
trustworthy. He glories in the pointless and 
wanton barbarity of the destruction of Carthage 
in the Third Pimic War as saving Europe from the 
Afro-Asiatic peril — pure nonsense, of course, for 
Carthage was then no more dangerous to Rome 
than Corinth was, and the sacks of the two cities 
stand on a par as regards any importance in their 
after effects. Perhaps his attitude toward Byron 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 241 

is more practically mischievous, or at least shows 
a much less desirable trait of character. He says 
that the personality of Byron ''has something re- 
pulsive in it for every thorough Teuton, because 
we nowhere encounter in it the idea of duty,'* 
which makes him "unsympathetic, un-Teutonic " ; 
but he adds that Teutons do not object in the 
least to his licentiousness, and, on the contrary, 
see in it "a proof of genuine race"! Really, this 
reconciliation of a high ideal of duty with gross 
licentiousness would be infamous if it were not 
so unspeakably comic. On the next page, by the 
way, Mr. Chamberlain says that Louis XIV was 
anti-Teutonic in his persecution of the Protes- 
tants, but a thorough Teuton when he defended 
the liberties of the Gallican church against Rome ! 
Now such intellectual antics as these, and the 
haphazard use of any kind of a name (without 
the least reference to its ordinary use, provided 
Mr. Chamberlain has taken a fancy to it) to rep- 
resent or symbolize any individual or attribute of 
which he approves, makes it very difficult to 
accept the book as having any serious merit what- 
ever. Yet interspersed with innumerable pages 
which at best are those of an able man whose 
mind is not quite sound, and at worst lose their 
brilliancy without their irrationality, there are 
many pages of deep thought and lofty morality 
based upon wide learning and wide literary and 



242 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 

even scientific knowledge. There could be no 
more unsafe book to follow implicitly, and few 
books of such pretensions more ludicrously un- 
sound; and yet it is a book which students and 
scholars, and men who, though neither students 
nor scholars, are yet deeply interested in life, must 
have on their book-shelves. Much the same criti- 
cism should be passed upon him that he himself 
passes upon John Fiske, to whose great work, 
''The History of the Discovery of America," he 
gives deserved and imstinted praise, but at whom 
he rails for solemnly, and, as Mr. Chamberlain 
says, with more than Papal pretensions to in- 
fallibility, setting forth complete patent solutions 
for all the problems connected not merely with 
the origin but with the destiny of man. Mr. 
Chamberlain differentiates sharply between the 
admirable work Fiske did in such a book as that 
treating of the discovery of America and the work 
he did when he ventured to dogmatize loosely, 
after the manner of Darwin's successors in the 
'70s and '80s, upon a scanty collection of facts 
very imperfectly understood. But Mr. Cham- 
berlain himself would have done far better if in 
his book he had copied the methods and modesty 
of Fiske at his best — the methods and modesty of 
such books as Sutherland's ''Origin and Growth 
of the Moral Instinct" — and had refrained from 
taking an attitude of cock-sureness concerning 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 243 

problems which at present no one can more than 
imperfectly tmderstand. He is imwise to follow 
Brougham's example and make omniscience his 
foible. 

Yet, after all is said, a man who can write such 
a really beautiful and solemn appreciation of true 
Christianity, of true acceptance of Christ's teach- 
ings and personality, as Mr. Chamberlain has 
done, a man who can sketch as vividly as he has 
sketched the ftmdamental facts of the Roman 
empire in the first three centuries of our era, a 
man who can warn us as clearly as he has warned 
about some of the pressing dangers which threaten 
our social fabric because of indulgence in a mor- 
bid and false sentimentality, a man, in short, who 
has produced in this one book materials for half 
a dozen excellent books on utterly diverse sub- 
jects, represents an influence to be reckoned with 
and seriously to be taken into account. 



THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH IN A 
REVERENT SPIRIT 



THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH IN A 
REVERENT SPIRIT 

THERE is superstition in science quite as 
much as there is superstition in theology, 
and it is all the more dangerous because 
those stiffering from it are profoundly convinced 
that they are freeing themselves from all super- 
stition. No grotesque repulsiveness of mediaeval 
superstition, even as it survived into nineteenth- 
century Spain and Naples, could be much more 
intolerant, much more destructive of all that is 
fine in morality, in the spiritual sense, and indeed 
in civilization itself, than that hard dogmatic 
materialism of to-day which often not merely 
calls itself scientific but arrogates to itself the 
sole right to use the term. If these pretensions 
affected only scientific men themselves, it would 
be a matter of small moment, but imfortimately 
they tend gradually to affect the whole people, and 
to establish a very dangerous standard of private 
and public conduct in the public mind. 

This tendency is dangerous ever3rwhere, but 
nowhere more dangerous than among the nations 
in which the movement toward an unshackled 

247 



248 THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH 

materialism is helped by the reaction against the 
deadly thraldom of political and clerical absolu- 
tism. The first of the books mentioned below ^ is 
written by a Montevideo gentleman of distinction. 
Under the rather fanciful title of ''The Death of 
the Swan" it deals with the shortcomings of Latin 
civilization, accepts whole-heartedly the doctrines 
of pure materialism as a remedy for these short- 
comings, and draws lessons from the success of the 
Northern races, and especially of our own count ry- 

^"La Mort du Cygne." By Carlos Reyles. Translation from 
Spanish into French by Alfred de Bengoechea. 

"Thoughts of a Catholic Anatomist." By Thomas Dwight, M.D. 

"The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages." By Henry Osborn 
Taylor. 

"Some Neglected Factors in Evolution." By Henry M. Bernard. 

"The World of Life." By Alfred Russel Wallace. 

"William James." By fimile Boutroux. 

"Science et Religion." By Emile Boutroux. 

"Science and Religion." By £mile Boutroux. Translation into 
English by Jonathan Nield. 

"Creative Evolution." By Henri Bergson. Authorized trans- 
lation by Arthur Mitchell. 

"The Varieties of Religious Experience." By William James. 

"Time and Free Will." By Henri Bergson. Translation by F. 
L. Pogson. 

"From Epicurus to Christ." By WilHam De Witt Hyde. 

"The Sixth Sense." By Bishop Charles H. Brent. 

I need hardly say that I am not attempting to review these books 
in even the briefest and most epitomized fashion. I use them only 
to illustrate certain phases, good and bad, in the search for truth; as, 
for instance, the harm that comes from seeking to apply, universally, 
truth as apprehended by the mere materialist, the futility of trying 
to check this harm by invoking the spirit of reactionary mediaevalism, 
and the fundamental agreement reached by truth-seekers of the high- 
est type, both scientific and religious. 



THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH 249 

men, which I, for one, am unwiUing to have drawn. 
The author feels that the civihzation of France, 
Italy, and Spain is going down, and that it owes 
its decadence to submission to an outworn gov- 
ernmental and ecclesiastical tyranny, and es- 
pecially to the futility of its ideals in government, 
religion, and the whole art of living, a futility so 
wrong-headed and far-reaching as to have turned 
aside the people from all that makes for real 
efficiency and success. In his revolt against sen- 
timentality, mock humanitarianism, and hypoc- 
risy the author advocates frank egotism and 
brutality as rules of conduct for both individuals 
and nations; and in his revolt against the theo- 
logical tyranny and superstition from which the 
Spanish peoples in the Old and New Worlds have 
suffered so much in the past he advocates implicit 
obedience to the revolting creed which would treat 
gold and force as the true and only gods for 
human guidance; and this he does in the name of 
science and enlightenment and of exact and cor- 
rect thinking. He speaks with admiration of cer- 
tain American qualities, confounding in curious 
fashion the use and abuse of great but dangerous 
traits. He fails to see that the line of separation 
between the school of Washington and of Lin- 
coln and the school of the prophets of brutal force, 
as expressed in the deification of either Mars or 
Mammon, is as sharp as that which distinguishes 



250 THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH 

both of these schools from the apostles of the silly 
sentiment alism which he justly condemns. He 
sees that the really great Americans were thor- 
oughly practical men; but he is blind to the fact 
that they were also lofty idealists. It was pre- 
cisely because they were both idealists and prac- 
tical men that they made their mark deep in 
history. He sees that they abhorred bigotry and 
superstition; he does not see that they were sun- 
dered as far from the men who attack all re- 
ligion and all order as from the men who uphold 
either governmental or religious tyranny. It was 
the fact that Washington and Lincoln refused to 
carry good policies to bad extremes, and at the 
same time refused to be frightened out of support- 
ing good policies because they might lead to bad 
extremes, that made them of such far-reaching 
usefulness. 

Dr. Dwight's book is very largely a protest 
against the materialistic philosophy which has 
produced such conceptions of life, and against these 
conceptions of life themselves. With this pro- 
test we must all heartily sympathize; imfortu- 
nately, it is impossible to have such sympathy 
with the reactionary spirit in which he makes his 
protest. There is much that is true in the as- 
sault he makes; but in his zeal to show where 
the leaders of the modem advance have been 
guilty of shortcomings he tends to assume posi- 



THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH 251 

tions which would put an instant stop to any 
honest effort to advance at all, and would plunge 
us back into the cringing and timid ignorance of 
the Dark Ages. Apparently the ideal after which 
Dr. Dwight strives is that embodied in the man 
of the Middle Ages of whom Professor Henry 
Osbom Taylor in one of his profound and able 
studies has said: *'The medieval man was not 
spiritually self-reliant, his character was not con- 
sciously wrought by its own strength of mind 
and purpose. Subject to bursts of unrestraint, he 
yet showed no intelligent desire for liberty." 

Dr. Dwight holds that there is an ominous 
parallelism between the lines of thought of the 
materialistic scientists of to-day and those of the 
French Revolution. Strongly though he disap- 
proves of much of the thought of modem science, 
he disapproves even more strongly of the Revolu- 
tion. In speaking of the similarities between them 
he says: 

''Among the characters of the Revolution we 
meet all kinds of company. There are the honest 
men anxious for reform, the protesters against 
what they conceived to be religious oppression, 
the dreamy idealists without definite plan, the 
ranting orators of the 'mountain,' fanatics and 
demagogues at once, the wily ones who make a 
living from the more or less sincere promulga- 
tion of revolutionary doctrines and who find 



252 THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH 

legalized plunder very profitable, the army of 
those who for fear or for favor prefer to be on the 
winning side and follow the fashionable doctrines 
without an examination which most of them are 
incompetent to make, and finally the mob of the 
sans-culottes rejoicing in the overthrow of law, 
order, and decency." 

This is true, although it does not contain by 
any means the whole truth; moreover, the paral- 
lelism with the scientific movement of the pres- 
ent day undoubtedly in part obtains. Yet the 
saying which Dr. Dwight quotes with approval 
from Herbert Spencer applies to what he himself 
attempts; to destroy the case of one's opponents 
and to justify one's own case are two very dif- 
ferent things. At present we are in greater danger 
of suffering in things spiritual from a wrong- 
headed scientific materialism than from religious 
bigotry and intolerance; just as at present we 
are threatened rather by what is vicious among 
the ideas that triumphed in the Revolution than 
we are from what is vicious in the ideas that it 
overthrew. But this is merely because victorious 
evil necessarily contains more menace than de- 
feated evil; and it will not do to forget the other 
side, nor to let our protest against the evil of the 
present drive us into championship of the evil of 
the past. The excesses of the French Revolution 
were not only hideous in themselves, but were 



THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH 253 

fraught with a menace to civiUzation which has 
lasted until our time and which has found its 
most vicious expression in the Paris Commune of 
187 1 and its would-be imitators here and in other 
lands. Nevertheless, there was hope for man- 
kind in the French Revolution, and there was 
none in the system against which it was a protest, 
a system which had reached its highest develop- 
ment in Spain. Better the terrible flame of the 
French Revolution than the worse than Stygian 
hopelessness of the tyranny — physical, intellec- 
tual, spiritual — which brooded over the Spain of 
that day. So it is with the modem scientific 
movement. There is very much in it to regret; 
there is much that is misdirected and wrong ; and 
Dr. Dwight is quite right in the protest he makes 
against Haeckel and to a less extent against 
Weismann, and against the intolerant arrogance 
and fanatical dogmatism which the scientists of 
their school display to as great an extent as ever 
did any of the ecclesiastics against whom they 
profess to be in revolt. The experience of our 
sister republic of France has shown us that not 
only scientists but politicians, professing to be 
radical in their liberalism, may in actual fact show 
a bigoted intolerance of the most extreme kind 
in their attacks on religion; and bigotry and in- 
tolerance are at least as objectionable when anti- 
religious as when nominally religious. But in his 



254 THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH 

entirely proper protest against these men and 
their Hke Dr. D wight is less than just to Dar- 
win and to many another seeker after truth, and 
he fails to recognize the obligation under which he 
and those like him have been put by the fearless 
pioneers of the new movement. The debt of 
mankind to the modem scientific movement is 
incalculable; the evil that has accompanied it 
has been real ; but the good has much outweighed 
the evil. It is only the triumph of the movement 
led by the men against whom Dr. Dwight pro- 
tests that has rendered it possible for books such 
as Dr. Dwight 's to be published with the approval 
—as in his case — of the orthodox thought of the 
church to which the writer belongs. 

The most significant feature of his book is the 
advance it marks in the distance which ortho- 
doxy has travelled. He grudgingly admits the doc- 
trine of evolution, although — quite rightly, and in 
true scientific spirit, by the way — he insists most 
strongly upon the fact that we are as yet groping 
in the dark as we essay to explain its causes or 
show its significance; and he is again quite right 
in holding up as an example to the dogmatists of 
modem science what Roger Bacon said in the 
thirteenth century: "The first essential for ad- 
vancement in knowledge is for men to be willing 
to say, 'We do not know.' " He, of course, treats 
of the solar system, the law of gravitation, and 



THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH 255 

the like as every other educated man now treats 
of them. Now, all of this represents a great ad- 
vance. A half -century ago no recognized author- 
ities of any church would have treated an evolu- 
tionist as an orthodox man. A century ago Dr. 
Dwight would not have been permitted to print 
his book as orthodox if it had even contained the 
statement that the earth goes round the sun. In 
the days of Leonardo da Vinci popular opinion 
sustained the church authorities in their refusal 
to allow that extraordinary man to dissect dead 
bodies, and the use of antitoxin would unques- 
tionably have been considered a very dangerous 
heresy from all standpoints. In their generations 
Copernicus and Galileo were held to be dangerous 
opponents of orthodoxy, just as Darwin was held 
to be when he brought out his ** Origin of Species," 
just as Mendel's work would have been held if 
Darwin's far greater work had not distracted at- 
tention from him. The discovery of the circula- 
tion of the blood was at the time thought by many 
worthy people to be in contradiction of what was 
taught in Holy Writ; and the men who first felt 
their way toward the discovery of the law of gravi- 
tation made as many blunders and opened them- 
selves to assault on as many points as was the 
case with those who first felt their way to the 
establishment of the doctrine of evolution. The 
Dr. Dwights of to-day can write with the free- 



256 THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH 

dom they do only because of the triumph of the 
ideas of those scientific innovators of the past 
whom the Dr. Dwights of their day emphatically 
condemned. 

But when Dr. D wight attacks the loose gen- 
eralizations, absurd dogmatism, and ludicrous as- 
sumption of omniscient wisdom of not a few of the 
so-called leaders of modem science, he is not only 
right but renders a real service. The claims of 
certain so-called scientific men as to "science over- 
throwing religion" are as baseless as the fears of 
certain sincerely religious men on the same sub- 
ject. The establishment of the doctrine of evolu- 
tion in our time offers no more justification for 
upsetting religious beliefs than the discovery of 
the facts concerning the solar system a few cen- 
turies ago. Any faith sufficiently robust to stand 
the — surely very slight — strain of admitting that 
the world is not flat and does move round the sun 
need have no apprehensions on the score of evo- 
lution, and the materialistic scientists who glee- 
fully hail the discovery of the principle of evolu- 
tion as estabHshing their dreary creed might with 
just as much propriety rest it upon the discovery 
of the principle of gravitation. Science and re- 
ligion, and the relations between them, are affected 
by one only as they are affected by the other. 
Genuine harm has been done by the crass material- 
ism of men like Haeckel, a materialism which, in 



THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH 257 

its unscientific assumptions and in its utter insuf- 
ficiency to explain all the phenomena it professes 
to explain, has been exposed in masterly fashion 
by such really great thinkers — such masters not 
only of philosophy but of material science — as Wil- 
liam James, Emile Boutroux, and Henri Bergson. 
It is worth while to quote the remarks of Alfred 
Russel Wallace, the veteran evolutionist: "With 
Professor Haeckel's dislike of the dogmas of theolo- 
gians and their claims as to the absolute knowl- 
edge of the nature and attributes of the inscrutable 
mind that is the power within and behind and 
around nature many of us have the greatest sym- 
pathy ; but we have none with his unfounded dog- 
matism of combined negation and omniscience, and 
more especially when this assumption of superior 
knowledge seems to be put forward to conceal his 
real ignorance of the nature of life itself." Dr. 
Dwight is emphatically right when he denies that 
science (using the word, as he does, as meaning 
merely the science of material things) has taught 
**a new and sufficient gospel," or that, to use his 
own words, there is any truth ''in the boast of 
infidel science that she and she alone has all that 
is worth having." He could go even further than 
he does in refuting the queer optimism of those 
evolutionists who insist that evolution in the 
human race necessarily means progress; for every 
true evolutionist must admit the possibility of 



2S8 THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH 

retrogression no less than of progress, and ex- 
actly as species of animals have sunk after having 
risen, so in the history of mankind it has again 
and again happened that races of men, and whole 
civilizations, have simk after having risen. In so 
far as Dr. Dwight's view of religion is that it 
is the gospel of duty and of human service, his 
view is emphatically right; and surely when the 
doctrine of the gospel of works is taken to mean 
the gospel of service to mankind, and not merely 
the performance of a barren ceremonial, it must 
command the respect, and I hope the adherence, 
of all devout men of every creed, and even of 
those who adhere to no creed of recognized ortho- 
doxy. 

In the same way I heartily sympathize with his 
condemnation of the men who stridently proclaim 
that "science has disposed of religion," and with 
his condemnation of the scientific men who would 
try to teach the community that there is no real 
meaning to the words "right" and "wrong," and 
who therefore deny free-will and accountability. 
Even as sound a thinker as Mr. Bernard, whose 
book is rightly, as he calls it, "an essay in con- 
structive biology," who in his theory of group de- 
velopment has opened a new biological and even 
sociological field of capital importance, who ex- 
plicitly recognizes the psychical accompaniment 
of physical force as something distinct from it. 



THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH 259 

and whose final chapter on the integration of the 
human aggregate shows that he has a far nobler 
view of life than any mere materialist can have, 
yet falls into the great mistake of denying free- 
dom of the will, merely because he with his finite 
material intelligence can not understand it. Dr. 
Dwight is right in his attitude toward the scien- 
tific men who thus assume that there is no freedom 
of the will because on a material basis it is not 
explicable. Whenever any so-called scientific men 
develop, as an abstract proposition, a theory in ac- 
cordance with which it would be quite impossi- 
ble to conduct the affairs of mankind for so much 
as twenty-four hours, the wise attitude of really 
scientific men would be to reject that theory, in- 
stead of following the example of the, I fear not 
wholly imaginary, scientist who, when told that 
the facts did not fit in with his theory, answered : 
*'So much the worse for the facts." M. Bergson, 
in his "Creative Evolution," has brought out with 
convincing clearness the great truth that the 
human brain, so able to deal with purely material 
things, and with sciences, such as geometry, in 
which thought is concerned only with unorganized 
matter, works under necessarily narrow limita- 
tions — limitations in reality very, very narrow, 
and never to be made really broad by mere in- 
tellect — when it comes to grasping any part of 
the great principle of life. Reason can deal effect- 



26o THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH 

ively only with certain categories. True wisdom 
must necessarily refuse to allow reason to assume 
a sway outside of its limitations; and where 
experience plainly proves that the intellect has 
reasoned wrongly, then it is the part of wisdom 
to accept the teachings of experience, and bid 
reason be humble — just as under like conditions 
it would bid theology be himible. A certain 
school of Greek philosophers was able to prove 
logically that there was not, and could not be, 
any such thing as motion, and that, even if there 
were, it was quite impossible logically for a pur- 
suing creature ever to overtake a fleeing creature 
which was going at inferior speed; but all that 
was really accomplished by this teaching was to 
prove the need of much greater intellectual humil- 
ity on the part of those who beHeved that they 
were capable of thinking out an explanation for 
everything. Mr. Bernard ought not to have been 
caught in such a dilemma, because of the very 
fact that he does not cast in his lot with the crass 
materialists; for he admits that there are many 
things we do not know, that there is much which 
our intelligence — necessarily functioning in ma- 
terial fashion — can not understand. It is just as 
idle for a man to try to explain everything in the 
moral and spiritual world by that which he is able 
to apprehend of the material world as it would 
be for a polyp to try to explain the higher emo- 



THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH 261 

tions of mankind in terms of polyp materialism. 
Not only would it be quite impossible to con- 
duct even the lowest form of civil society without 
practical acknowledgment of free-will and ac- 
countability — an acknowledgment always made in 
practice by every single individual of those who 
deny it in theory — but even in their writings the 
very men who deny free-will and accountability 
inevitably and continually use language which 
has no meaning except on the supposition that 
both of them exist. Mr. Bernard, for instance, 
on the same page on which he denies freedom of 
the will, makes an impatient plea for just lav/s, and 
explains that by ''just laws" he means laws that 
are in accordance with the highest conceptions of 
human relationships; he complains that the legal 
idea of justice is invariably far behind that of our 
psychic perceptions; and elsewhere, as on page 
457, he speaks of the ''duties" of man and of his 
"moral perceptions," and on page 473 he asks 
for perfection of the community, so that "social 
life worked out by the highest wisdom of man- 
kind will at once rise to a newer and higher physical 
and psychic level." All of this is meaningless if 
there are no such things as freedom of the will and 
accoimtability ; and its goes to show that even a 
profound and original thinker, if he has dwelt too 
long in the realms where the pure materialist is 
king, needs to pay heed to M. Bergson's pregnant 



262 THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH 

saying that ''pure reasoning needs to be super- 
vised by common sense, which is an altogether 
different thing." A part, and an essential part, 
of the same truth is expressed by Mr. Taylor when 
he paraphrases Saint Augustine in insisting that 
"the truths of love are as vaHd as the truths of 
reason." 

Dr. Dwight and the many men whose habits 
of thought are similar to his perform a real serv- 
ice when they keep people from being led astray 
by the mischievous dogmas of those who would 
give to each passing and evanescent phase of ma- 
teriaHstic scientific thought a dogmatic value; 
and our full acknowledgment of this service does 
not in the least hinder us from also realizing and 
acknowledging that the advance in scientific dis- 
covery, which has been and will be of such price- 
less worth to mankind, can not be made by men of 
this type, but only by the bolder, more self-reliant 
spirits, by men whose imfettered freedom of soul 
and intellect yields complete fealty only to the 
great cause of truth, and will not be hindered by 
any outside control in the search to attain it. A 
brake is often a useful and sometimes an indis- 
pensable piece of equipment of a wagon ; but it is 
never as important as the wheels. As the Uni- 
versity of Wisconsin declared when Dr. Richard 
T. Ely was tried for economic heresy: "In all 
lines of investigation the investigator must be 



THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH 263 

absolutely free to follow the paths of truth wher- 
ever they may lead." 

It is always a difficult thing to state a position 
which has two sides with such clearness as to 
bring it home to the hearers. In the world of 
politics it is easy to appeal to the unreasoning 
reactionary, and no less easy to appeal to the 
unreasoning advocate of change, but difficult to 
get people to show for the cause of sanity and 
progress combined the zeal so easily aroused 
against sanity by one set of extremists and against 
progress by another set of extremists. So in the 
world of the intellect it is easy to take the position 
of the hard materialists who rail against religion, 
and easy also to take the position of those whose 
zeal for orthodoxy makes them distrust all action 
by men of independent mind in the search for 
scientific truth; but it is not so easy to make it 
understood that we both acknowledge our ines- 
timable debt to the great masters of science, and 
yet are keenly alive to their errors and decline to 
surrender our judgment to theirs when they go 
wrong. It is imperative to realize how very grave 
their errors are, and how foolish we should be to 
abandon our adherence to the old ideals of duty 
toward God and man without better security than 
the more radical among the new prophets can 
offer us. The very blindest of those new scientific 
prophets are those whose complacency is greatest 



264 THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH 

in their belief that the material key is that which 
unlocks all the mysteries of the universe, and that 
the finite mind of man can, not merely understand, 
but pass supercilious judgment upon, these mys- 
teries. Mr. Wallace stands in honorable contrast 
to the men of this stamp. No one has criticised 
with greater incisiveness what he properly calls 
"the vague, incomprehensible, and offensive as- 
sertions of the biologists of the school of Haeckel." 
He shows his scientific superiority to these men by 
his entire realization of the limitations of the 
human intelligence, by his realization of the folly 
of thinking that we have explained what we are 
simply unable to imderstand when we use such 
terms as ''infinity of time" and ''infinity of 
space" to cover our ignorance; and he stands 
not far away from the school of MM. Boutroux 
and Bergson, and, old man though he is, comes 
near the attitude of the more serious among the 
yoimger present-day scientific investigators — of 
the stamp of Professor Osbom, of the American 
Museum of Natural History — in his readiness to 
acknowledge that the materiaHstic and mechan- 
ical explanations of the causes of evolution have 
broken down, and that science itself furnishes an 
overwhelming argument for "creative power, di- 
rective mind, and ultimate purpose" in the process 
of evolution. 

The law of evolution is as unconditionally ac- 



THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH 265 

cepted by every serious man of science to-day as 
is the law of gravitation ; and it is no more and no 
less foolish to regard one than the other as an- 
tagonistic to religion. To reject either on Bib- 
lical grounds stands on a par with insisting, on the 
same grounds, that geological science must rec- 
oncile itself — and astronomy as well — to a uni- 
verse only six thousand years old. The type of 
theologian who takes such a position occupies 
much the same intellectual level with the strutting 
materialists of the Haeckel type. To all men of 
this kind I most cordially commend a capital 
book, ''Evolution and Dogma," by the Rev. J. 
A. Zahm, one-time professor of physics at the 
University of Notre Dame, in Indiana. 

The great distinguishing feature of the cen- 
turies immediately past has been the extraor- 
dinary growth in man's knowledge of, and power 
to understand and command, his own physical 
nature and his physical surroundings in the uni- 
verse. It is this growth which so sharply dis- 
tinguishes modem civilization, the civilization 
which we may roughly date as beginning about 
the time of Colimibus's voyage, from all preceding 
civilizations; and it has not only immeasurably 
increased man's power over nature, but, when 
rightly understood, has also measurably added to 
his inner dignity and worth, and to his power and 
command over things spiritual no less than ma- 



266 THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH 

terial. This conquest could have been achieved 
only by men who dared to follow wherever their 
longing for the truth led them, and who were 
masters of their own consciences, and as little 
servile to the past as to the present. But no 
such movement for the uplifting of mankind ever 
has taken place, or ever will or can take place, 
without being fraught also with great dangers to 
mankind. Our hope lies in progress, for if we try 
to remain stationary we shall surely go backward ; 
and yet as soon as we leave the ground on which 
we stand in order to advance there is always 
danger that we shall plunge into some abyss. 

Naturally, the men who have taken the lead 
in these extraordinary material discoveries have 
often tended to think that there is nothing to 
discover or to believe in except what is material. 
Much of the growth in our understanding of 
nature has been due to men whose high abilities 
were nevertheless rigidly limited in certain di- 
rections. Our knowledge of solar systems so in- 
conceivably remote that the remoteness is itself 
unreal to our senses; our knowledge of animate 
and inanimate forces working on a scale so in- 
finitesimal and yet so powerful as to be almost 
impossible for our imaginations to grasp; our 
knowledge of the eons through which life has ex- 
isted on this planet; the extraordinary advances 
in knowledge denoted by the establishment of 



THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH 267 

such doctrines as those of gravitation and of evolu- 
tion; in short, the whole enormous incredible 
advance in knowledge of the physical universe 
and of man's physical place in that universe, has 
been due to the labor of students whose special 
tastes and abilities lay in the direction of dealing 
with what is purely material. Their astounding 
success, and the far-reaching, indeed the stupen- 
dous, importance of their achievements, have 
naturally tended to make those among them who 
possess genuine but narrow ability, whose minds 
are keen but not broad, assume an attitude of 
hard, arrogant, boastful, self -sufficient materialism : 
a mental attitude which glorifies and exalts its 
own grievous shortcomings and its inability to 
perceive anything outside the realm of the body. 
This attitude is as profoundly repellent as that 
of the civil and ecclesiastical reactionaries, the 
foes of all progress, against whom these men pro- 
fess to be in revolt; and, moreover, it is an at- 
titude which is itself as profoundly unscientific 
as any of the anti-scientific attitudes which it 
condemns. The universal truth can never be 
even imperfectly understood or apprehended un- 
less we have the widest possible knowledge of our 
physical surroundings, and unless we fearlessly 
endeavor to find out just what the facts and the 
teachings of these physical surroundings are; but 
neither will it ever be understood if the physical 



268 THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH 

and material explanations of life are accepted as 
all-sufficient. By none is this more clearly rec- 
ognized than by the most acute and far-sighted 
of the investigators into physical conditions. Says 
Mr. Bernard : * 'There are psychic elements wholly 
different in kind from the physical elements . . . 
[they] constitute, in a way impossible to define, a 
new character, quality, element — or shall we at 
once boldly borrow a term from mathematics 
and call it a new 'dimension' of our environment, 
hitherto three-dimensional ? These various mental 
conditions lead us to believe that at any moment, 
while being driven through this three-dimensional 
environment, we may also be plunged into a 
psychic condition which hangs like an atmosphere 
over our particular physical surroundings." 

Not only every truly religious, but every truly 
scientific, man must turn with relief from the nar- 
rowness of a shut-in materialism to the profound 
and lofty thought contained in the writings of 
William James, of his biographer, M. Emile Bou- 
troux, and of another philosopher of the same 
school, M. Bergson. M. Boutroux's study of 
William James gives in brief form — and with a 
charm of style and expression possible only for 
those who work with that delicate instrument of 
precision, French prose — the views which men of 
this stamp hold; and be it remembered that, like 
James, they are thoroughly scientific men, steeped 



THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH 269 

in the teachings of material science, who acknowl- 
edge no outside limitation upon them in their 
search for truth. They have a far keener imder- 
standing of the world of matter than has been 
attained by the purely materialistic scientists, 
just because, in addition, they also imderstand 
that outside of the purely physical lies the psychic, 
and that the realm of religion stands outside even 
of the purely psychic. M. Boutroux's book on 
"Science and Religion" has been translated into 
English — and we owe a real debt of gratitude to 
Messrs. Nield and Mitchell for their excellent 
translations of MM. Boutroux and Bergson. 
There is much talk of the conflict between science 
and religion. The inherent absurdity of such talk 
has never been better expressed than by M. Bou- 
troux when he says that such opposition ''is the 
result of our defining both science and religion 
in an artificial manner by, on the one hand, iden- 
tifying science with physical science, and, on the 
other hand, assuming that religion consists in the 
dogmas which merely symbolize it." M. Bou- 
troux's book, like M. Bergson's ''Creative Evolu- 
tion," must be read in its entirety; mere extracts 
and condensations can not show the profound 
philosophical acimien with which these men go 
to the heart of things, and prove that science it- 
self, if correctly understood, renders absurd the 
harsh and futile dogmatism of many of those 



270 THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH 

who pride themselves upon being, above all 
things, scientific. For, as these writers point 
out, the work of the scientist is conditioned upon 
the existence of the free determination of a spirit 
which, dominating the scientific spirit, believes 
also in an aesthetic and moral ideal. They see 
the material, the physical body, in its relation to 
other physical bodies; and back of and beyond 
the physical they see life itself, consciousness, 
which is to be conceived of as something always 
dynamic and never static, as a ''stream of con- 
sciousness," a "becoming." 

As M. Boutroux finely says, religion gives to 
the individual his value and treats him as an end 
in himself, no less than treating him from the 
standpoint of his duties to other individuals. 
This philosophy is founded on a wide and sym- 
pathetic understanding of the facts of the material 
world, a frank acceptance of evolution and of all 
else that modem science has ever taught; and 
so those who profess it are in a position of im- 
pregnable strength when they point out that all 
this in no shape or way interferes with religion and 
with Christianity, because, as they hold, evolu- 
tion in religion has merely tended to disengage 
it from its own gross and material wrapping, 
and to leave unfettered the spirit which is its 
essence. To them Christianity, the greatest of 
the religious creations which humanity has seen. 



THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH 271 

rests upon what Christ himself teaches; for, as 
M. Boutroux phrases it, the performance of duty 
is faith in action, faith in its highest expression, 
for duty gives no other reason, and need give no 
other reason, for its existence than ''its own in- 
corruptible disinterestedness." The idea thus ex- 
pressed is at bottom based on the same truth to 
which expression is given by Mr. Taylor when he 
says: ''The love of God means not despising but 
honoring self; and for Christians on earth the 
true love of God must show itself in doing earth's 
duties and living out earth's full life, and not in 
abandoning all for dreams, though the dreams be 
of heaven." To men such as William James and 
these two French philosophers physical science, if 
properly studied, shows conclusively its own 
limitations, shows conclusively that beyond the 
material world lies a vast series of phenomena 
which all material knowledge is powerless to ex- 
plain, so that science itself teaches that outside 
of materialism lie the forces of a wholly different 
world, a world ordered by religion — religion which, 
says M. Boutroux, must, if loyal to itself, work 
according to its own nature as a spiritual activity, 
striving to transform men from within and not 
from without, by persuasion, by example, by love, 
by prayer, by the communion of souls, not by re- 
straint or policy; and such a religion has nothing 
to fear from the progress of science, for the spirit 



272 THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH 

to which it is loyal is the faith in duty, the search 
for what is for the universal good and for the uni- 
versal love, the secret springs of all high and 
beneficent activity. 

It is striking to see how these two gifted French- 
men, by their own road, reach substantially the 
same conclusion which, by a wholly different 
method, and indeed in treating religion from a 
wholly different standpoint, is also reached by the 
president of Bowdoin College. Mr. Hyde's short 
volume combines in high degree a lofty nobility 
of ethical concept with the most practical and 
straightforward common-sense treatment of the 
ways in which this concept should be realized in 
practice. Each of us must prescribe for himself 
in these matters, and one man's need will not be 
wholly met by what does meet another's; per- 
sonally, this book of President Hyde's gives me 
something that no other book does, and means 
to me very, very much. 

We must all strive to keep as our most precious 
heritage the liberty each to worship his God as to 
him seems best, and, as part of this liberty, freely 
either to exercise it or to surrender it, in a greater 
or less degree, each according to his own beliefs 
and convictions, without infringing on the beliefs 
and convictions of others. But the professors of 
the varying creeds, the men who rely upon author- 
ity, and those who in different measures profess 



THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH 273 

the theory of individual Hberty, can and must 
work together, with mutual respect and with 
self-respect, for certain principles which lie deep 
at the base of every healthy social system. As 
Bishop Brent says: "The only setting for any one 
part of the truth is all the rest of the truth. The 
only relationship big enough for any one man is 
all the rest of mankind." Abbot Charles, of 
Saint Leo Abbey, in Florida, has recently put the 
case for friendly agreement among good men of 
varying views, when he simimed up a notably 
fine address in defence — as he truly says, friendly 
defence — of his own church by enimciating the 
plea for ''true peace founded on justice," worked 
out in accordance with what he properly calls one 
of the "dearest blessings that heaven can give, 
the spirit that springs from religious liberty." 
However widely many earnest and high-minded 
men of science and many earnest and high-minded 
men of religious convictions may from one side 
or the other disagree with the teachings of the 
earnest and high-minded students of philosophy 
whom I have quoted, yet surely we can all be in 
agreement with the fundamentals on which their 
philosophy is based. Surely we must all recog- 
nize the search for truth as an imperative duty; 
and we ought all of us likewise to recognize that 
this search for truth should be carried on, not only 
fearlessly, but also with reverence, with humility 



274 THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH 

of spirit, and with full recognition of our own 
limitations both of the mind and the soul. We 
must stand equally against tyranny and against 
irreverence in all things of the spirit, with the 
firm conviction that we can all work together for 
a higher social and individual life if only, what- 
ever form of creed we profess, we make the doing 
of duty and the love of our fellow men two of the 
prime articles in our imiversal faith. To those 
who deny the ethical obligation implied in such a 
faith we who acknowledge the obligation are aliens ; 
and we are brothers to all those who do acknowl- 
edge it, whatever their creed or system of philos- 
ophy. 



THE ANCIENT IRISH SAGAS 



THE ANCIENT IRISH SAGAS 

NEXT to developing original writers in its 
own time, the most fortunate thing, from 
the literary standpoint, which can befall 
any people is to have revealed to it some new 
treasure-house of literature. This treasure-house 
may be stored with the writings of another people 
in the present, or else with the writings of a buried 
past. But a few generations ago, in that inno- 
cent age when Blackstone could speak of the 
''Goths, Huns, Franks, and Vandals" — incon- 
gruous gathering — as "Celtic" tribes, the long- 
vanished literatures of the ancestors of the pres- 
ent European nations, the epics, the sagas, the 
stories in verse or prose, were hardly known to, 
or regarded by, their educated and cultivated 
descendants. Gradually, and chiefly in the nine- 
teenth century, these forgotten literatures, or 
fragments of them, were one by one recovered. 
They are various in merit and interest, in antiq- 
uity and extent — "Beowulf," the Norse sagas, 
the "Kalevala," the "Nibelungenlied," the "Song 
of Roland," the Arthurian cycle of romances. In 
some there is but one great poem ; in some all the 

277 



278 THE ANCIENT IRISH SAGAS 

poems or stories are of one type; in others, as in 
the case of the Norse sagas, a wide range of his- 
tory, myth, and personal biography is covered. 
In our own day there has at last come about a 
popular revival of interest in the wealth of poems 
and tales to be foimd in the ancient Celtic, and 
especially in the ancient Erse, manuscripts — the 
whole forming a body of prose and poetry of 
great and well-nigh imique interest from every 
standpoint, which in some respects can be matched 
only by the Norse sagas, and which has some 
striking beauties the like of which are not to be 
found even in these Norse sagas. 

For many decades German, French, Irish, and 
English students have worked over the ancient 
Celtic texts, and recently many of the more stri- 
king and more beautiful stories have been repro- 
duced or paraphrased in popular form by writers 
like Lady Gregory and Miss Hull, Lady Gregory 
showing in her prose something of the charm 
which her coimtrywoman Emily Lawless shows 
in her poems ' ' With the Wild Geese. " It is greatly 
to be regretted that America should have done so 
little either in the way of original study and re- 
search in connection with the early Celtic litera- 
ture, or in the way of popularizing and familiar- 
izing that literature, and it is much to be desired 
that, wherever possible, chairs of Celtic should be 
established in our leading universities. More- 



THE ANCIENT IRISH SAGAS 279 

over, in addition to the scholar's work which is 
especially designed for students, there must ul- 
timately be done the additional work which puts 
the results of the scholarship at the disposal of 
the average layman. This has largely been done 
for the Norse sagas. William Morris has trans- 
lated the "Heimskringla" into language which, 
while not exactly English, can nevertheless be 
tmderstood without difficulty — which is more than 
can be said for his translation of ''Beowulf" — 
and which has a real, though affectedly archaic, 
beauty. Dasent has translated the ''Younger 
Edda," the "Njala Saga," and the "Saga of GisH 
the Outlaw." It is pleasant for Americans to 
feel that it was Longfellow who, in his "Saga of 
King Olaf," rendered one of the most striking of 
the old Norse tales into a great poem. 

It is difficult to speak with anything like exact- 
ness of the relative ages of these primitive litera- 
tures. Doubtless in each case the earhest manu- 
scripts that have come down to us are themselves 
based upon far earlier ones which have been des- 
troyed, and doubtless, when they were first writ- 
ten down, the tales had themselves been recited, 
and during the course of countless recitations had 
been changed and added to and built upon, for a 
period of centiuies. Sometimes, as in the "Song 
of Roland," we know at least in bare outline the 
historical incident which for some reason impressed 



28o THE ANCIENT IRISH SAGAS 

the popular imagination until around it there 
grew up a great epic, of which the facts have been 
twisted completely out of shape. In other in- 
stances, as in the ''Nibelungenlied," a tale, adapt- 
able in its outlines to many different peoples, was 
adapted to the geography of a particular people, 
and to what that people at least thought was his- 
tory; thus the Rhine becomes the great river of 
the ''Nibelungenlied," and in the second part of 
the epic the revenge of Krimhild becomes con- 
nected with dim memories of Attila's vast and 
evanescent empire. The ''Song of Roland" and 
the ' ' Nibelungenlied " were much later than the 
earliest English, Norse, and Irish poems. Very 
roughly, it may perhaps be said that, in the ear- 
liest forms at which we can guess, the Irish sagas 
were produced, or at least were in healthy life, 
at about the time when ''Beowulf" was a live 
saga, and two or three centuries or thereabouts 
before the early Norse sagas took a shape which 
we would recognize as virtually akin to that they 
now have. 

These Celtic sagas are conveniently, though 
somewhat artificially, arranged in cycles. In 
some ways the most interesting of these is the 
Cuchulain cycle, although until very recently it 
was far less known than the Ossianic cycle — the 
cycle which tells of the deeds of Finn and the 
Fianna. The poems which tell of the mighty 



THE ANCIENT IRISH SAGAS 281 

feats of Cuchulain, and of the heroes whose Hfe- 
threads were interwoven with his, date back to a 
purely pagan Ireland — an Ireland cut off from all 
connection with the splendid and slowly dying 
civilization of Rome, an Ireland in which still 
obtained ancient customs that had elsewhere 
vanished even from the memory of man. 

Thus the heroes of the Cuchulain sagas still 
fought in chariots driven each by a charioteer 
who was also the stanch friend and retainer of 
the hero. Now, at one time war chariots had 
held the first place in the armies of all the power- 
ful empires in the lands adjoining the Mediter- 
ranean and stretching eastward beyond the Tigris. 
Strange African tribes had used them north and 
south of the Atlas Mountains. When the mighty, 
conquering kings of Egypt made their forays into 
Syria, and there encountered the Hittite hosts, 
the decisive feature in each battle was the shock 
between the hundreds of chariots arrayed on each 
side. The tyranny of Sisera rested on his nine 
hundred chariots of iron. The Homeric heroes 
were ''tamers of horses," which were not ridden 
in battle, but driven in the war chariots. That 
mysterious people, the Etruscans, of whose race 
and speech we know nothing, originally fought in 
chariots. But in the period of Greek and Roman 
splendor the war chariot had already passed 
away. It had seemingly never been characteristic 



282 THE ANCIENT IRISH SAGAS 

of the wild Teuton tribes; but among the west- 
em Celts it lingered long. Caesar encountered it 
among the hostile tribes when he made his famous 
raid into Britain; and in Ireland it lasted later 
still. 

The customs of the heroes and people of the 
Erin of Cuchulain's time were as archaic as the 
chariots in which they rode to battle. The sagas 
contain a wealth of material for the historian. 
They show us a land where the men were herds- 
men, tillers of the soil, hunters, bards, seers, but, 
above all, warriors. Erin was a world to herself. 
Her people at times encountered the peoples of 
Britain or of Continental Europe, whether in 
trade or in piracy; but her chief interest, her over- 
whelming interest, lay in what went on within 
her own borders. There was a high king of 
shadowy power, whose sway was vaguely recog- 
nized as extending over the island, but whose prac- 
tical supremacy was challenged on every hand by 
whatever king or under-king felt the fierce whim 
seize him. There were chiefs and serfs; there 
were halls and fortresses; there were huge herds 
of horses and cattle and sheep and swine. The 
kings and queens, the great lords and their wives, 
the chiefs and the famous fighting men, wore gar- 
ments crimson and blue and green and saffron, 
plain or checkered, and plaid and striped. They 
had rings and clasps and torques of gold and 



THE ANCIENT IRISH SAGAS 283 

silver, urns and mugs and troughs and vessels of 
iron and silver. They played chess by the fires 
in their great halls, and they feasted and drank 
and quarrelled within them, and the women had 
sun-parlors of their own. 

Among the most striking of the tales are those 
of the ''Fate of the Sons of Usnach," telling of 
Deirdre's life and love and her lamentation for 
her slain lover; of the "Wooing of Emer" by 
Cuchulain; of the "Feast of Bricriu"; and of 
the famous Cattle-Spoil of Cooley, the most fa- 
mous romance of ancient Ireland, the story of 
the great raid for the Dun Bull of Cooley. But 
there are many others of almost equal interest; 
such as the story of MacDatho's pig, with its 
Gargantuan carouse of the quarrelsome cham- 
pions; and the tale of the siege of Howth. 

In these tales, which in so many points are 
necessarily like the similar tales that have come 
down from the immemorial past of the peoples of 
kindred race, there are also striking peculiarities 
that hedge them apart. The tales are found in 
many versions, which for the most part have been 
enlarged by pedantic scribes of aftertime, who 
often made them prolix and tedious, and added 
grotesque and fantastic exaggerations of their own 
to the barbaric exaggerations already in them, 
doing much what Saxo Grammaticus did for the 
Scandinavian tales. They might have been woven 



284 THE ANCIENT IRISH SAGAS 

into some great epic, or at least have taken far 
more definite and connected shape, if the history 
of Ireland had developed along lines similar to 
those of the other nations of west Europe. But 
her history was broken by terrible national trag- 
edies and calamities. To the scourge of the vi- 
kings succeeded the Anglo-Norman conquest, with 
all its ruinous effects on the growth of the national 
life. The early poems of the Erse bards could 
not develop as those other early lays developed 
which afterward became the romances of Arthur 
and Roland and Siegfried. They remain primitive, 
as ''Beowulf" is primitive, as, in less measure, 
''Gisli the Outlaw" is primitive. 

The heroes are much like those of the early 
folk of kindred stock everywhere. They are huge, 
splendid barbarians, sometimes yellow-haired, 
sometimes black- or brown-haired, and their chief 
title to glory is found in their feats of bodily prow- 
ess. Among the feats often enumerated or re- 
ferred to are the ability to leap like a salmon, to 
run like a stag, to hurl great rocks incredible dis- 
tances, to toss the wheel, and, like the Norse 
berserkers, when possessed with the fury of battle, 
to grow demoniac with fearsome rage. This last 
feat was especially valued, and was recognized as 
the "heroes' fury." As with most primitive 
peoples, the power to shout loudly was much 
prized, and had a distinct place of respect, under 



THE ANCIENT IRISH SAGAS 285 

the title of ''mad roar," in any list of a given hero's 
exhibitions of strength or agility ; just as Stentor's 
voice was regarded by his comrades as a valuable 
military asset. So, when the slaughter begins in 
Etzel's hall, the writer of the Nibelung lay dwells 
with admiration on the vast strength of Diede- 
rick, as shown by the way in which his voice rang 
like a bison horn, resounding within and without 
the walls. Many of the feats chronicled of the 
early Erse heroes are now wholly unintelligible 
to us; we can not even be sure what they were, 
still less why they should have been admired. 

Among the heroes stood the men of wisdom, as 
wisdom was in the early world, a vulpine wisdom 
of craft and cunning and treachery and double- 
dealing. Druids, warlocks, sorcerers, magicians, 
witches appear, now as friends, now as imfriends, 
of the men of might. Fiercely the heroes fought 
and wide they wandered ; yet their fights and their 
wanderings were not very different from those 
that we read about in many other primitive tales. 
There is the usual incredible variety of incidents 
and character, and, together with the variety, an 
endless repetition. But these Erse tales differ 
markedly from the early Norse and Teutonic 
stories in more than one particular. A vein of 
the supernatural and a vein of the romantic run 
through them and relieve their grimness and 
harshness in a way very different from anything 



286 THE ANCIENT IRISH SAGAS 

to be found in the Teutonic. Of course the super- 
natural element often takes as grim a form in 
early Irish as in early Norse or German; the 
Goddess with red eyebrows who on stricken fields 
wooed the Erse heroes from life did not differ es- 
sentially from the Valkyrie; and there were land 
and water demons in Ireland as terrible as those 
against which Beowulf warred. But, in addition, 
there is in the Irish tales an unearthliness free 
from all that is monstrous and horrible ; and their 
imearthly creatures could become in aftertime the 
fairies of the moonlight and the greenwood, so 
different from the trolls and gnomes and mis- 
shapen giants bequeathed to later generations by 
the Norse mythology. 

Still more striking is the difference between the 
women in the Irish sagas and those, for instance, 
of the Norse sagas. Their heirs of the spirit are 
the Arthurian heroines, and the heroines of the 
romances of the Middle Ages. In the "Song of 
Roland" — rather curiously, considering that it is 
the first great piece of French literature — woman 
plays absolutely no part at all; there is not a 
female figure which is more than a name, or 
which can be placed beside Roland and Oliver, 
Archbishop Turpin and the traitor Ganelon, and 
Charlemagne, the mighty emperor of the "barbe 
fieurie." The heroines of the early Norse and 
German stories are splendid and terrible, fit to 



THE ANCIENT IRISH SAGAS 287 

be the mothers of a mighty race, as stern and re- 
lentless as their lovers and husbands. But it 
would be hard indeed to find among them a hero- 
ine who would appeal to our modern ideas as does 
Emer, the beloved of Cuchulain, or Dierdre, the 
sweetheart of the fated son of Usnach. Emer and 
Deirdre have the charm, the power of inspiring 
and returning romantic love, that belonged to the 
ladies whose lords were the knights of the Round 
Table, though of course this does not mean that 
they lacked some very archaic tastes and attributes. 
Emer, the daughter of Forgall the Wily, who 
was wooed by Cuchulain, had the "six gifts of a 
girl" — beauty, and a soft voice, and sweet speech, 
and wisdom, and needlework, and chastity. In 
their wooing the hero and heroine spoke to one 
another in riddles, those delights of the childhood 
of peoples. She set him journeys to go and feats 
to perform, which he did in the manner of later 
knight errant s. After long courting and many 
hardships, he took Emer to wife, and she was 
true to him and loved him and gloried in him and 
watched over him until the day he went out to 
meet his death. All this was in a spirit which we 
would find natural in a heroine of modern or of 
mediaeval times — a spirit which it would be hard 
to match either among the civilizations of an- 
tiquity, or in early barbarisms other than the 
Erse. 



288 THE ANCIENT IRISH SAGAS 

So it was with Deirdre, the beautiful girl who 
forsook her betrothed, the Over-King of Ulster, 
for the love of Naisi, and fled with him and his 
two brothers across the waters to Scotland. At 
last they returned to Ireland, and there Deirdre 's 
lover and his two brothers were slain by the 
treachery of the king whose guests they were. 
Many versions of the Songs of Deirdre have come 
down to us, of her farewell to Alba and her lament 
over her slain lover; for during centuries this 
tragedy of Deirdre, together with the tragical fate 
of the Children of Lir and the tragical fate of the 
Children of Tuirenn, were known as the ''Three 
Sorrowful Tales of Erin." None has better re- 
tained its vitality down to the present day. Even 
to us, reading the songs in an alien age and tongue, 
they are very beautiful. Deirdre sings wistfully 
of her Scottish abiding-place, with its pleasant, 
cuckoo-haunted groves, and its cliffs, and the 
white sand on the beaches. She tells of her lover's 
single infidelity, when he came enamoured of the 
daughter of a Scottish lord, and Deirdre, broken- 
hearted, put off to sea in a boat, indifferent whether 
she should live or die ; whereupon the two brothers 
of her lover swam after her and brought her back, 
to find him very repentant and swearing a three- 
fold oath that never again would he prove false 
to her until he should go to the hosts of the dead. 
She dwells constantly on the unfailing tenderness 



THE ANCIENT IRISH SAGAS 289 

of the three heroes; for her lover's two brothers 
cared for her as he did: 



"Much hardship would I take, 
Along with the three heroes; 
I would endure without house, without fire, 
It is not I that would be gloomy. 

*' Their three shields and their spears 
Were often a bed for me. 
Put their three hard swords 
Over the grave, O young man!" 

For the most part, in her songs, Deirdre dwells 
on the glories and beauties of the three warriors, 
the three dragons, the three champions of the 
Red Branch, the three that used to break e very- 
onrush, the three hawks, the three darlings of 
the women of Erin, the three heroes who were 
not good at homage. She sings of their splendor 
in the foray, of their nobleness as they returned to 
their home, to bring fagots for the fire, to bear in 
an ox or a boar for the table; sweet though the 
pipes and flutes and horns were in the house of 
the king, sweeter yet was it to hearken to the songs 
sung by the sons of Usnach, for ''like the sound of 
the wave was the voice of Naisi." 

There were other Irish heroines of a more com- 
mon barbarian type. Such was the famous war- 
rior-queen, Meave, tall and beautiful, with her 



290 THE ANCIENT IRISH SAGAS 

white face and yellow hair, terrible in her battle 
chariot when she drove at full speed into the press 
of fighting men, and "fought over the ears of the 
horses." Her virtues were those of a warlike 
barbarian king, and she claimed the like large 
liberty in morals. Her husband was Ailill, the 
Connaught king, and, as Meave carefully ex- 
plained to him in what the old Erse bards called 
a "bolster conversation," their marriage was liter- 
ally a partnership wherein she demanded from her 
husband an exact equality of treatment accord- 
ing to her own views and on her own terms; the 
three essential qualities upon which she insisted 
being that he should be brave, generous, and 
completely devoid of jealousy! 

Fair-haired Queen Meave was a myth, a god- 
dess, and her memory changed and dwindled 
until at last she reappeared as Queen Mab of 
fairyland. But among the ancient Celts her like- 
ness was the likeness of many a historic warrior 
queen. The descriptions given of her by the first 
writers or compilers of the famous romances of 
the foray for the Dun Bull of Cooley almost ex- 
actly match the descriptions given by the Latin 
historian of the British Queen Boadicea, tall and 
terrible-faced, her long, yellow hair flowing to her 
hips, spear in hand, golden collar on neck, her 
brightly colored mantle fastened across her breast 
with a brooch. 



THE ANCIENT IRISH SAGAS 291 

Not only were some of Meave's deeds of a 
rather startling kind, but even Emer and Deirdre 
at times showed traits that to a modem reader 
may seem out of place, in view of what has been 
said of them above. But we must remember the 
surroundings, and think of what even the real 
women of history were, throughout European 
lands, until a far later period. In the "Heims- 
kringla" we read of Queen Sigrid, the wisest of 
women, who grew tired of the small kings who 
came to ask her hand, a request which she did not 
regard them as warranted to make either by posi- 
tion or extent of dominion. So one day when two 
kings had thus come to woo her, she lodged them 
in a separate wooden house, with all their com- 
pany, and feasted them until they were all very 
drunk, and fell asleep; then in the middle of the 
night she had her men fall on them with fire and 
sword, bum those who stayed within the hall and 
slay those who broke out. The incident is men- 
tioned in the saga without the slightest condem- 
nation; on the contrary, it evidently placed the 
queen on a higher social level than before, for, 
in concluding the account, the saga mentions that 
Sigrid said ''that she would weary these small 
kings of coming from other lands to woo her; so 
she was called Sigrid Haughty thereafter." Now, 
Sigrid was an historical character who lived many 
hundred years after the time of Emer and Deirdre 



292 THE ANCIENT IRISH SAGAS 

and Meave, and the simplicity with which her 
deed was chronicled at the time, and regarded 
afterward, should reconcile us to some of the feats 
recorded of those shadowy Erse predecessors of 
hers, who were separated from her by an inter- 
val of time as great as that which separates her 
from us. 

The story of the ''Feast of Bricriu of the Bitter 
Tongue" is one of the most interesting of the 
tales of the Cuchulain cycle. In all this cycle of 
tales, Bricriu appears as the cunning, malevolent 
mischief-maker, dreaded for his biting satire and 
his power of setting by the ears the boastful, 
truculent, reckless, and marvellously short-tem- 
pered heroes among whom he lived. He has 
points of resemblance to Thersites, to Sir Kay, of 
the Arthurian romances, and to Conan, of the 
Ossianic cycle of Celtic sagas. This story is based 
upon the custom of the "champion's portion," 
which at a feast was allotted to the bravest man. 
It was a custom which lasted far down into his- 
toric times, and was recognized in the Brehon 
laws, where a heavy fine was imposed upon any 
person who stole it from the one to whom it be- 
longed. The story in its present form, like all of 
these stories, is doubtless somew^hat changed from 
the story as it was originally recited among the 
pre-Christian Celts of Ireland, but it still com- 
memorates customs of the most primitive kind, 



THE ANCIENT IRISH SAGAS 293 

many of them akin to those of all the races of 
Aryan tongue in their earlier days. The queens 
cause their maids to heat water for the warriors* 
baths when they return from war, and similarly 
made ready to greet their guests, as did the 
Homeric heroines. The feasts were Homeric 
feasts. The heroes boasted and sulked and fought 
as did the Greeks before Troy. At their feasts, 
when the pork and beef, the wheaten cakes and 
honey, had been eaten, and the beer, and some- 
times the wine of Gaul, had been drunk in huge 
quantities, the heroes, vainglorious and quarrel- 
some, were always apt to fight. Thus in the three 
houses which together made up the palace of the 
high king at Emain Macha, it was necessary that 
the arms of the heroes should all be kept in one 
place, so that they could not attack one another 
at the feasts. These three houses of the palace 
were the Royal House, in which the high king 
himself had his bronzed and jewelled room; the 
Speckled House, where the swords, the shields, 
and the spears of the heroes were kept; and the 
House of the Red Branch, where not only the 
weapons, but the heads of the beaten enemies 
were stored; and it was in connection with this 
last grewsome house that the heroes in the train 
of the High King Conchubar took their name of 
the ''Heroes of the Red Branch." 

When Bricriu gave his feast, he prepared for 



294 THE ANCIENT IRISH SAGAS 

it by building a spacious house even handsomer 
than the House of the Red Branch; and it is de- 
scribed in great detail, as fashioned after "Tara's 
Mead Hall," and of great strength and magnifi- 
cence; and it was stocked with quilts and blan- 
kets and beds and pillows, as well as with abun- 
dance of meat and drink. Then he invited the 
high king and all the nobles of Ulster to come to 
the feast. An amusing touch in the saga is the 
frank consternation of the heroes who were thus 
asked. They felt themselves helpless before the 
wiles of Bricriu, and at first refused outright to 
go, because they were sure that he would con- 
trive to set them to fighting with one another; 
and they went at all only after they had taken 
hostages from Bricriu and had arranged that he 
should himself leave the feast-hall as soon as the 
feast was spread. But their precautions were in 
vain, and Bricriu had no trouble in bringing about 
a furious dispute among the three leading chiefs, 
Loigaire the Triumphant, Conall the Victorious, 
and Cuchulain. He promised to each the cham- 
pion's portion, on condition that each should 
claim it. Nor did he rest here, but produced what 
the saga calls ''the war of words of the women of 
Ulster," by persuading the three wives of the 
three heroes that each should tread first into the 
banquet-hall. Each of the ladies, in whose minds 
he thus raised visions of social precedence, had 



THE ANCIENT IRISH SAGAS 295 

walked away from the palace with half a hundred 
women in her train, when they all three met. The 
saga describes how they started to return to the 
hall together, walking evenly, gracefully, and 
easily at first, and then with quicker steps, until, 
when they got near the house, they raised their 
robes ''to the round of the leg" and ran at full 
speed. When they got to the hall the doors were 
shut, and, as they stood outside, each wife chanted 
her own perfections, but, above all, the valor 
and ferocious prowess of her husband, scolding 
one another as did Brunhild and Krimhild in the 
quarrel that led to Siegfried's death at the hands 
of Hagen. Each husband, as in duty bound, 
helped his wife into the hall, and the bickering 
which had already taken place about the cham- 
pion's portion was renewed. At last it was set- 
tled that the three rivals should drive in their 
chariots to the home of Ailill and Meave, who 
should adjudge between them; and the judgment 
given, after testing their prowess in many ways, 
and especially in encounters with demons and 
goblins, was finally in favor of Cuchulain. 

One of the striking parts of the tale is that in 
which the three champions, following one another, 
arrive at the palace of Meave. The daughter of 
Meave goes to the sun-parlor over the high porch 
of the hold, and from there she is told by the 
queen to describe in turn each chariot and the 



296 THE ANCIENT IRISH SAGAS 

color of the horses and how the hero looks and how 
the chariot courses. The girl obeys, and de- 
scribes in detail each chariot as it comes up, and 
the queen in each case recognizes the champion 
from the description and speaks words of savage 
praise of each in turn. Loigaire, a fair man, 
driving two fiery dapple-grays, in a wickerwork 
chariot with silver-mounted yoke, is chanted by 
the queen as: 

"A fury of war, a fire of judgment, 
A flame of vengeance; in mien a hero. 
In face a champion, in heart a dragon; 
The long knife of proud victories which will hew us to 

pieces, 
The all-noble, red-handed Loigaire." 

Conall is described as driving a roan and a bay, 
in a chariot with two bright wheels of bronze, he 
himself fair, in face white and red, his mantle blue 
and crimson, and Meave describes him as: 

''A wolf among cattle; battle on battle. 
Exploit on exploit, head upon head he heaps"; 

and says that if he is excited to rage he will cut 
up her people 

"As a trout on red sandstone is cut." 



THE ANCIENT IRISH SAGAS 297 

Then Cuchulain is described, driving at a gallop 
a dapple-gray and a dark-gray, in a chariot with 
iron wheels and a bright silver pole. The hero 
himself is a dark, melancholy man, the comeliest 
of the men of Erin, in a crimson tunic, with gold- 
hilted sword, a blood-red spear, and over his 
shoulders a crimson shield rimmed with silver and 
gold. Meave, on hearing the description, chants 
the hero as: 

''An ocean in fury, a whale that rageth, a fragment of 

flame and fire; 
A bear majestic, a grandly moving billow, 
A beast in maddening ire: 
In the crash of glorious battle through the hostile foe 

he leaps. 
His shout the fury of doom; 
A terrible bear, he is death to the herd of cattle, 
Feat upon feat, head upon head he heaps: 
Laud ye the hearty one, he who is victor fully." 

Bricriu lost his life as a sequel of the great raid 
for the Dun Bull of Cooley. This was undertaken 
by Queen Meave as the result of the ''bolster 
conversation," the curtain quarrel, between her 
and Ailill as to which of the two, husband or 
wife, had the more treasure. To settle the dis- 
pute, they compared their respective treasures, 
beginning with their wooden and iron vessels, 
going on with their rings and bracelets and 



298 THE ANCIENT IRISH SAGAS 

brooches and fine clothes, and ending with their 
flocks of sheep, and herds of swine, horses, and 
cattle. The tally was even for both sides until 
they came to the cattle, when it appeared that 
Ailill had a huge, white-horned bull with which 
there was nothing of Meave's to compare. The 
chagrined queen learned from a herald that in 
Cooley there was a dim or brown bull which, it 
was asserted, was even larger and more formi- 
dable. 

Meave announces that by fair means or foul 
the dun bull shall be hers, and she raises her hosts. 
A great war ensues, in which Cuchulain distin- 
guishes himself above all others. All the heroes 
gather to the fight, and a special canto is de- 
voted to the fate of a very old man, Iliach, a 
chief of Ulster, who resolves to attack the foe and 
avenge Ulster's honor on them. ''Whether, then, 
I fall or come out of it, is all one," he said. The 
saga tells how his withered and wasted old horses, 
which fed on the shore by his little fort, were 
harnessed to the ancient chariot, which had long 
lost its cushions. Into it he got, mother-naked, 
with his sword and his pair of blunt, rusty spears, 
and great throwing-stones heaped at his feet; 
and thus he attacked the hosts of Meave and 
fought till his death. In the Cuchulain sagas the 
heroes frequently fight with stones ; and the prac- 
tice obtained until much later days, for in Olaf's 



THE ANCIENT IRISH SAGAS 299 

death-battle with the ships of Hakon his men were 
cleared from the decks of the Long Serpent by 
dexterously hurled stones as well as by spears. 

Partly by cimning, Meave gets the dun bull 
upon which she had set her heart. Then comes 
in a thoroughly Erse touch. It appears that the 
two bulls have lived many lives in different forms, 
and always in hostility to each other, since the 
days when their souls were the souls of two swine- 
herds, who quarrelled and fought to the death. 
Now the two great bulls renew their ancient fight. 
Bricriu is forced out to witness it, and is trampled 
to death by the beasts. At last the white-homed 
bull is slain, and the dun, raging and destroying, 
goes back to his home, where he too dies. And 
this, says the saga, in ending, is the tale of the 
Dun Bull of Cooley and the Driving of the Cattle- 
Herd by Meave and Ailill, and their war with 
Ulster. 

The Erse tales have suffered from many causes. 
Taken as a mass, they did not develop as the sagas 
and the epics of certain other nations developed; 
but they possess extraordinary variety and beauty, 
and in their mysticism, their devotion to and ap- 
preciation of natural beauty, their exaltation of 
the glorious courage of men and of the charm and 
devotion of women, in all the touches that tell 
of a long-vanished life, they possess a curious at- 
traction of their own. They deserve the research 



300 THE ANCIENT IRISH SAGAS 

which can be given only by the Hfelong effort of 
trained scholars; they should be studied for their 
poetry, as countless scholars have studied those 
early literatures ; moreover, they should be studied 
as Victor Berard has studied the ''Odyssey," for 
reasons apart from their poetical worth; and 
finally they deserve to be translated and adapted 
so as to become a familiar household part of that 
literature which all the English-speaking peoples 
possess in common. 



AN ART EXHIBITION 



AN ART EXHIBITION 

THE recent ''International Exhibition of 
Modem Art" in New York was really 
noteworthy. Messrs. Davies, Kuhn, Gregg, 
and their fellow members of the Association of 
American Painters and Sculptors did a work 
of very real value in securing such an exhibi- 
tion of the works of both foreign and native 
painters and sculptors. Primarily their purpose 
was to give the public a chance to see what has 
recently been going on abroad. No similar col- 
lection of the works of European ''modems" has 
ever been exhibited in this coimtry. The ex- 
hibitors were quite right as to the need of showing 
to our people in this manner the art forces which 
of late have been at work in Europe, forces which 
can not be ignored. 

This does not mean that I in the least accept 
the view that these men take of the European 
extremists whose pictures were here exhibited. It 
is true, as the champions of these extremists say, 
that there can be no life without change, no de- 
velopment without change, and that to be afraid 
of what is different or unfamiliar is to be afraid 

303 



304 AN ART EXHIBITION 

of life. It is no less true, however, that change 
may mean death and not life, and retrogression 
instead of development. Probably we err in 
treating most of these pictures seriously. It is 
likely that many of them represent in the painters 
the astute appreciation of the power to make 
folly lucrative which the late P. T. Bamum showed 
with his faked mermaid. There are thousands of 
people who will pay small sums to look at a faked 
mermaid; and now and then one of this kind 
with enough money will buy a Cubist picture, or a 
picture of a misshapen nude woman, repellent 
from every standpoint. 

In some ways it is the work of the American 
painters and sculptors which is of most interest 
in this collection, and a glance at this work must 
convince any one of the real good that is coming 
out of the new movements, fantastic though many 
of the developments of these new movements are. 
There was one note entirely absent from the 
exhibition, and that was the note of the common- 
place. There was not a touch of simpering, self- 
satisfied conventionality anywhere in the exhi- 
bition. Any sculptor or painter who had in him 
something to express and the power of expressing 
it found the field open to him. He did not have 
to be afraid because his work was not along or- 
dinary lines. There was no stunting or dwarfing, 
no requirement that a man whose gift lay in new 



AN ART EXHIBITION 305 

directions should measure up or down to stereo- 
typed and fossilized standards. 

For all of this there can be only hearty praise. 
But this does not in the least mean that the ex- 
tremists whose paintings and pictures were rep- 
resented are entitled to any praise, save, perhaps, 
that they have helped to break fetters. Probably 
in any reform movement, any progressive move- 
ment, in any field of life, the penalty for avoid- 
ing the commonplace is a liability to extravagance. 
It is vitally necessary to move forward and to 
shake off the dead hand, often the fossilized dead 
hand, of the reactionaries; and yet we have to 
face the fact that there is apt to be a lunatic 
fringe among the votaries of any forward move- 
ment. In this recent art exhibition the lunatic 
fringe was fully in evidence, especially in the 
rooms devoted to the Cubists and the Futurists, 
or Near-Impressionists. I am not entirely cer- 
tain which of the two latter terms should be used 
in connection with some of the various pictures 
and representations of plastic art — and, frankly, 
it is not of the least consequence. The Cubists 
are entitled to the serious attention of all who find 
enjoyment in the colored puzzle-pictures of the 
Sunday newspapers. Of course there is no reason 
for choosing the cube as a symbol, except that it 
is probably less fitted than any other mathe- 
matical expression for any but the most formal 



3o6 AN ART EXHIBITION 

decorative art. There is no reason why people 
should not call themselves Cubists, or Octagon- 
ists, or Parallelopipedonists, or Knights of the Isos- 
celes Triangle, or Brothers of the Cosine, if they 
so desire; as expressing anything serious and per- 
manent, one term is as fatuous as another. Take 
the picture which for some reason is called'* A 
Naked Man Going Down Stairs." There is in 
my bathroom a really good Navajo rug which, 
on any proper interpretation of the Cubist theory, 
is a far more satisfactory and decorative picture. 
Now, if, for some inscrutable reason, it suited 
somebody to call this rug a picture of, say, ''A 
Well-Dressed Man Going Up a Ladder," the name 
would fit the facts just about as well as in the 
case of the Cubist picture of the ''Naked Man 
Going Down Stairs." From the standpoint of ter- 
minology each name would have whatever merit 
inheres in a rather cheap straining after effect ; and 
from the standpoint of decorative value, of sincer- 
ity, and of artistic merit, the Navajo rug is in- 
finitely ahead of the picture. 

As for many of the human figures in the pic- 
tures of the Futurists, they show that the school 
would be better entitled to the name of the 
"Past-ists." I was interested to find that a man 
of scientific attainments who had likewise looked 
at the pictures had been struck, as I was, by 
their resemblance to the later work of the palseo- 



AN ART EXHIBITION 307 

lithic artists of the French and Spanish caves. 
There are interesting samples of the strivings for 
the representation of the human form among 
artists of many different countries and times, all 
in the same stage of palaeolithic culture, to be 
found in a recent number of the "Revue d'Ethno- 
graphie." The palaeolithic artist was able to por- 
tray the bison, the mammoth, the reindeer, and 
the horse with spirit and success, while he still 
stumbled painfully in the effort to portray man. 
This stumbling effort in his case represented prog- 
ress, and he was entitled to great credit for it. 
Forty thousand years later, when entered into 
artificially and deliberately, it represents only a 
smirking pose of retrogression, and is not praise- 
worthy. So with much of the sculpture. A 
family group of precisely the merit that inheres 
in a structure made of the wooden blocks in a 
nursery is not entitled to be reproduced in marble. 
Admirers speak of the kneeling female figure by 
Lehmbruck — I use ''female" advisedly, for al- 
though obviously mammalian it is not especially 
human — as ''full of lyric grace," as "tremen- 
dously sincere," and "of a jewel-like preciousness." 
I am not competent to say whether these words 
themselves represent sincerity or merely a con- 
ventional jargon; it is just as easy to be conven- 
tional about the fantastic as about the common- 
place. In any event one might as well speak of 



3o8 AN ART EXHIBITION 

the "lyric grace" of a praying mantis, which 
adopts much the same attitude; and why a de- 
formed pelvis should be called ''sincere," or a 
tibia of giraffe-like length ''precious," seems to a 
reasonably sane view of the pictures of Matisse 
a question of pathological rather than artistic 
significance. This figure and the absurd portrait 
head of some young lady have the merit that in- 
heres in extravagant caricature. It is a merit, 
but it is not a high merit. It entitles these pieces 
to stand in sculpture where nonsense rhymes 
stand in literature and the sketches of Aubrey 
Beardsley in pictorial art. These modern sculp- 
tured caricatures in no way approach the gargoyles 
of Gothic cathedrals, probably because the mod- 
em artists are too self-conscious and make them- 
selves ridiculous by pretentiousness. The makers 
of the gargoyles knew very well that the gargoyles 
did not represent what was most important in 
the Gothic cathedrals. They stood for just a lit- 
tle point of grotesque reaction against, and re- 
lief from, the tremendous elemental vastness and 
grandeur of the Houses of God. They were imps, 
sinister and comic, grim and yet futile, and they 
fitted admirably into the framework of the theol- 
ogy that found its expression in the towering 
and wonderful piles which they ornamented. 

Very little of the work of the extremists among 
the European "modems" seems to be good in 



AN ART EXHIBITION 309 

and for itself ; nevertheless it has certainly helped 
any number of American artists to do work that 
is original and serious ; and this not only in paint- 
ing but in sculpture. I wish the exhibition had 
contained some of the work of the late Marcius 
Symonds; very few people knew or cared for it 
while he lived; but not since Turner has there 
been another man on whose canvas glowed so 
much of that unearthly "light that never was on 
land or sea." But the exhibition contained so 
much of extraordinary merit that it is ungrateful 
even to mention an omission. To name the pic- 
tures one would like to possess — and the bronzes 
and tanagras and plasters — would mean to make 
a catalogue of indefinite length. One of the most 
striking pictures was the ''Terminal Yards" — the 
seeing eye was there, and the cunning hand. I 
should like to mention all the pictures of the 
president of the association, Arthur B. Davies. 
As first-class decorative work of an entirely new 
type, the very unexpected pictures of Sheriff Bob 
Chandler have a merit all their own. The ''Ari- 
zona Desert," the "Canadian Night," the group 
of girls on the roof of a New York tenement-house, 
the studies in the Bronx Zoo, the "Heracles," 
the studies for the Utah monument, the little 
group called "Gossip," which has something of 
the quality of the famous fifteenth idyl of The- 
ocritus, the "Pelf," with its grim suggestiveness 



3IO 



AN ART EXHIBITION 



— these and a hundred others are worthy of 
study, each of them; I am naming at random 
those which at the moment I happen to recall. 
I am not speaking of the acknowledged masters, 
of Whistler, Puvis de Chavannes, Monet; nor of 
John's children; nor of Cezanne's old woman with 
a rosary ; nor of Redon's marvellous color-pieces — 
a worthy critic should speak of these. All I am 
trying to do is to point out why a layman is 
grateful to those who arranged this exhibition. 



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